


The Sarcophagus Job

by Teyke



Category: Leverage, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Betrayal, F/M, Gen, Heist!fic, Loyalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26822770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: The mark: Stargate Command. The target: an artifact that the SGC has been concealing from the world for the past decade—a piece of alien technology with the potential to save millions of lives. But as the con begins to unravel, the Leverage crew find they’re not the only ones with a hidden agenda...
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 44
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

When two airmen showed up to escort her to an even drabber concrete room, outfitted only with two chairs and a table, Sophie knew the game was up. Then they handcuffed her to the chair. It was bolted to the floor.

She could have gotten out of the cuffs with one of her hairpins, but there were guards at the door. And where would she go?

They let her stew for a good hour or so—impossible to tell time down here—before the general deigned to show up. There was a nasty triumphant look in his eye as he took the seat opposite and dumped a file on the table, flipping it open. Her own face stared back up at her, a damning list of her identities printed in black underneath.

Well. This had been a losing game from the beginning, really. She’d already known they were miles past anything Nate would have considered for plan double-Z.

_Nate._

Sophie lifted her chin, and raised her wrist, letting the chains clink. “I suppose this explains the handcuffs.”

“I suppose it explains why you’re so concerned about security breaches,” the general retorted.

She smiled, just a little. “It’s a living.”

“Uh-huh.” His triumphant look darkened, becoming more of a glower. “Now, Ms. Smithe-Patel—or whichever name you want—I can tell you’re a sophisticated, complicated lady. But I’m afraid I’m a very simple man, so we’re going to have to work on my level, here. You’re going to tell us exactly how you got past our security and what you did while inside, and in return, you might not spend the _entire_ remainder of your natural life in a cell.”

* * *

####  _Six weeks ago:_

“—won’t even let me _meet_ them, Nate, really—”

“Unusual circumstances, I explained that—”

Nate and Sophie’s argument preceded them into the apartment and continued on. Parker, Eliot, and Hardison all looked up warily; there was a belligerent note in Nate’s voice that they’d all learned could lead to genuine nastiness pretty damn quick. It’d been there more often than not since that job last week had gone to hell, and, fine, none of them had liked how that one ended, but it didn’t mean Nate needed to take it out on them.

“Look, we’re all here, can we run this or not?” said Nate, gesturing impatiently at them all.

Hardison raised an eyebrow. “Hey, man, I am _good_ , but even I can’t put together a briefing without a client name, or a target, or even a, a situation.”

“Yeah, well. No client. Our _contact_ is a professional paranoid and I don’t want to spook him in case I need to talk to him again.” Nate remained standing, staring at the blank screens for a moment before he turned. “The target is the SGC.”

The reaction from the younger three was simultaneous:

“Ooooh.”

“What? No!”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

Sophie, her eyebrows now raised, tried to catch Nate’s gaze, but he didn’t look at her. His expression was studiously neutral. “I see you’ve heard of it before.” He gestured at Parker, who was looking surprised, annoyed, and vaguely anticipatory. “Parker?”

“They’re the guys who live under a mountain, right?” At his nod, she continued: “I got hired to do a job once, put a tap on their lines out. Their security was insane! I spent an entire night wrapped up in thermo-reflective foil sneaking slooooowly uphill through a forest—my client and I cooked it up to defeat their heat sensors. And motion sensors. They had a lot of those.” She frowned. “But something tipped them off anyway. I nearly got caught on the way out. With dogs.” Her initially excited expression had settled into sourness. “And then my client disappeared on me without paying up. She disappeared _really well_ , too. I never managed to track her down.”

“Woah,” said Hardison. “Yeah, uh, your client wouldn’t happen to have been called TippleMary78, huh?”

“No. Just Mary.”

“Right. Yeah. It’s probably not her fault she—huh, I didn’t even know she was a she—welched on you.”

“She _didn’t pay me._ ”

“Yeah, ‘cause she went missing and was never heard from again. The SGC? That’s a legend in my circles. Secret government project, billions of dollars in secret funding, kept totally off the public books. You know what they call it in Pentagon memos? Area 52.”

“ _That_ Area 52? You wouldn’t tell me about Area 52! What is it? What does SGC stand for? What are they doing with the money?”

“Billions,” said Sophie, not quite disbelievingly.

“I... don’t actually know—no, really, babe, I don’t. A couple years ago people started putting the pieces together that there was something there, started making a go at getting into it, and then, vwoop, vanishing, and I mean _gone_. TippleMary wasn’t the only one never heard from again after saying they were gonna make an attempt at ‘em, though I didn’t know she tried to get in on the hardline. That’d take balls. Uh, ladyballs. Y’know.”

“You ever try?” asked Nate.

“Yes I did, and I got my ass whooped.” Hardison sat forward and stabbed a finger down at the desk. “I went in through the Pentagon servers—do you know how impressive that is, getting in to the Pentagon’s servers? Most hackers’d be wetting-their-pants-excited at getting that far, but that was just the _connection_ point, here. I got to the SGC firewall and it was out of this world. Like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. I’ve developed a lot of cool shit based off the bits of code I saw that day and I only got a glimpse of it.”

“You never tried again?” asked Eliot.

“Naw, man. They punched right back through _my_ defences and let me tell you, I rabbited and I am not ashamed of that. Got on a plane out of the country that day. Which is why I am the only hacker in the world who’s hacked the SGC and not vanished off the face of the earth.”

“When was this?”

“Couple years ago. During that summer vacation we all took after taking down, uh, IYS.” He glanced at Nate.

Nate was staring at Eliot. “Eliot?”

Eliot grunted. “Why the SGC?”

“Not going to share your story with the class?”

“They’re a government... conspiracy. That’s not our thing. What did your _contact_ tell you they’ve got that you want to steal?”

There was a tiny shift of _aha_ in Nate’s expression. “You’ve worked for them.”

“You worked for them!” said Hardison.

Parker bounced up, eyes narrowing accusingly. “You worked for them?”

“Yes, alright, I worked for them, and unlike other jobs they bothered to give me an NDA, but that doesn’t mean they won’t just bury us all the same if they find us screwing around with them. This is a job without a client, going up against—” Eliot cut himself off, lowering his voice back to even. “So, why?”

Nate had turned to face the black screens again, hands shoved in his pockets, posture tense.

“Nate?” asked Sophie.

“Medical technology,” said Nate.

Oh. Hardison, Parker, and Sophie exchanged long glances. Eliot... was frowning, doing thinking of his own.

“The SGC, as it is known—”

“Never even figured out what it stands for,” muttered Hardison.

“—has, over the past decade, been developing and... acquiring cutting-edge technology across a number of fields, technology that they are sitting on in the interest of ‘national security’. Our contact used to be one of their researchers. Some of what he’s described is... well. You tell me, Eliot.”

He turned, meeting Eliot’s eyes and holding them, flat and level.

“He tell you what the SGC actually does?” At Nate’s slight nod, Eliot frowned harder. “And you believed him?”

“He took some office supplies with him when he left. They were convincing.”

“Oh, that’s just great.”

“Eliot.” Nate was looking at him like he was trying to turn him inside out with his brain. Eliot shifted in his seat, ran a hand through his hair, and visibly forced himself to stillness. That look of Nate’s could make a person feel like a bug that had been pinned under a magnifying glass, and even Eliot wasn’t always immune. “He talked about research that could cure—anything. Bring back the dead.”

Sophie sat forward. “Nate...”

His expression was very flat, very controlled. “They have functioning prototypes. Is that correct, Eliot?”

Eliot looked down, looked at his hands, looked at all of them. Grimaced. He looked as unhappy as Nate. “Yeah. Yeah, but—it’s not—when I was there, at least, they don’t know how it works, entirely—”

“How can they not know how it works?” asked Hardison.

“—and, there’s side-effects—”

Sophie, looking highly unnerved, asked, “Side-effects worse than being dead?”

“I—well, no,” to Sophie, “it’s complicated,” to Hardison, “but—”

“Are they zombies?” asked Parker. “If people have souls—but they’re dead, and then they’re not dead—” She sounded more upset with every word.

“How do you _accidentally_ make something that can bring back the dead, there’s gotta be somebody who knows how it works—”

“I don’t know, Parker, Hardison, I’m not a scientist!”

“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Nate’s voice cut through the discussion, and they all turned back to him. “If it’s being developed, if scientists are looking into it, they’re doing that _only_ under the umbrella of the SGC, where—no, it’s not a priority. They’re more interested in weapons development. Technology that could save countless lives, that could change the world, and it’s wrapped up in so much top-secret tape it’ll never see the light of day, because it’s _not a priority._ ”

“Yeah, well, they do have some pretty important priorities they _have_ to keep on top of, Nate. We can’t just knock that over—”

“Then you think they’re justified? Locking down that technology, you think all the people dying without it are acceptable collateral?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying—look, even if we can take them on, and I’m really not sure we can—”

“You ain’t the only one,” muttered Hardison.

Nate was unphased. “They’re people. They’re all just people, guys.”

“—then they’re people doing a really damn important job! We can’t go in and wreck shit, the SGC _has_ to continue to function.”

“What is it they do?” asked Sophie. “If they’re a military secret—is there some global balance of power thing here?”

“No. They’re—kinda international, there were a couple teams, when I was there. I dunno, that was before all this.” Eliot made a circle in the air with his finger. Before the team. “They—uh.” He cut himself off, looked at all of them again, Nate last. Nate tipped his head forward, a silent order. Eliot grimaced again. “They... fight aliens.”

* * *

####  _Four days ago:_

Mitchell stuck his head around the doorframe and knocked against the open door. “General?”

Landry looked up and scowled immediately, which was never a good sign. Mitchell could think of two or maybe three recent activities by certain members of SG-1 that might have put that expression there, but he hadn’t thought any of those would have been brought to Landry’s attention. And none of them particularly fit with the result of ordering his team split in half.

“What is it, Colonel?”

He stepped more fully into the room. “Just a question about the mission roster, sir. SG-1 was supposed to be on stand-down this week.”

The scowl intensified. “The IOA moved its next meeting up. And they want it held here. Friday.”

Everything became clear. “I see, sir. Well, I’m sure SG-8 will appreciate having Vala and Jackson’s expertise available to them on, ah, P2N-983.” Jackson, at least, wouldn’t mind doing a low-risk meet-and-greet. Vala... well, that would be Jackson’s problem.

Landry snorted. “I’m sure those two will manage to find excitement somehow. Just so long as they don’t come back through the ‘Gate before the IOA is out of here, I’ll be happy.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotten a heads up that the new rep from India is a real hardass with a bone to pick.”

Great. That meant that the other three members of SG-1 definitely weren’t getting out of this. Carter was way too useful to have around if you needed to intimidate somebody into backing off with the sheer size of her brain. The IOA tended to run hot and cold on their opinions of Teal’c—he was a representative of an alien power collaborating with Earth-based forces, so some of the civvies liked the idea of him, some were intimidated and some were xenophobic—but at least he knew how to read a room and put himself forward or gracefully fade out as needed. And Mitchell was 2IC. No get-out-of-jail-free card for him.

Meanwhile, Vala liked antagonizing bureaucrats too much and found it far too easy to lead Jackson astray, too.

Which, he thought, as the General dismissed him, possibly meant that they were the smart ones, here.

* * *

####  _Ten hours ago:_

“I’m afraid we do have to ask that any phones and computers be left here. It’s standard protocol to ensure that no unsecured device goes in or out of the base.”

“My assistant’s laptop was already approved,” the Indian representative said imperiously.

“It has no wireless capability and runs the security software that your people provided,” her assistant added, conciliatory by comparison.

“Of course, sir. The sergeant here will scan it in.” The laptop case was handed over, while the two gave up their phones—both with expressions of mild distaste—into secured baskets. Williams locked both and handed the representatives the keys. “For your safekeeping. Now, ma’am, if you could please look into the biometric scanner and not blink—”

“I do know how these things work,” she said, stepping up and not flinching as the red light flickered across her eyes.

The scanner blinked identification: _Olivia Smithe-Patel, International Oversight Advisory Representative,_ _Republic of India_. Williams suppressed a sigh of relief. Sometimes biometric information transmitted from third parties didn’t play well with their security systems, and he didn’t think Smithe-Patel would have had any patience for a delay. But it appeared that the IOA had its ducks in order this time. In short order, he had printed a badge for her, and then he went through the process a second time with the representative’s assistant. By then, Sergeant Kanroy had finished checking the laptop, and reported, “No signals and it’s got the software, sir.”

“Thank you, sergeant.” Williams looked back at the IOA rep, who seemed extremely unimpressed with this report. “This way through the metal detectors, ma’am, sir.”

* * *

The assistant was fiddling with his laptop bag constantly on the elevator ride down, opening and closing it. Williams imagined that if he had to deal with the Indian rep full-time, he’d probably develop a nervous fidget, too, and politely looked away.

Near Level 28, Smithe-Patel finally snapped, “Ravi! Will you _stop_?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Williams saw Smithe-Patel grab her assistant’s hand, forcibly stilling him.

Neither he nor the airman with them noticed the handoff.

* * *

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Smithe-Patel, sounding anything but as the French representative held on to her hand just a moment too long. He gave an awkward smile and let go hastily.

Half a minute later, he scratched his ear.

* * *

####  _Six weeks ago:_

Hardison took a breath. It was another job. It was an insane, amazing, literally out-of-this-world job, except that he was still mostly convinced that Eliot and Nate were having the rest of them on, but if it was _real_... “Alright, so, where do we start with this? Can’t exactly go in as janitorial staff or food delivery here. Mail’ll be screened...”

“They’ve got hand-print readers at the entrance,” said Eliot. He frowned. “That was eight years ago, they’ve probably upgraded.”

Parker was frowning too, at her laptop screen, where she had the Wikipedia page for Cheyenne Mountain pulled up. _Wikipedia._ See, Nate, this was what happened when he wasn’t allowed to prep a briefing. “The NORAD base on top was built to be able to go into full lockdown in the case of a nuclear attack. They’re going to have their own air system, fans, filtration, all built to DoD standards—I’m not going to be able to go through the vents.”

“If they’ve got biometric scanning on all the entrances—”

“Entrance,” said Eliot. “There’s only one.”

“Great. One entrance. The biometrics are gonna be stored past that firewall. I can’t get through that, Nate.”

“Ah. But how does _it_ get past the firewall?” Nate stood up from the desk, walking around it and over to the bar. “Information goes into that mountain, and it comes back out. They’re told who they should let in, who they shouldn’t. If we can’t scout inside the mountain, we scout around it, and then we make ourselves look like something they want to let in.” He looked over at Sophie and winked.

“I’ve never played a member of the US military before,” she said, intrigued.

Nate shrugged. “You might not have to, we’ll see how the options work out. This isn’t eight years ago. Their program’s expanded since then. It’s not as insular. They’ve got more international contacts, they’ve got more bureaucracy—they have people who go in and out, who aren’t there all the time.” He looked back to Hardison. “Those people, they’re our way in.”

“And our way out? They’ll be scanning everything going out, they’re gonna notice if we’ve grabbed a hard drive,” said Eliot.

“Oh, I have faith in Hardison’s ability to transfer data once he’s got access to it.” Nate smiled. “The tricky part will be the prototype. They have two on base. We’ll be taking one with us.”

Eliot shook his head. “Won’t work. Are you kidding? It’s called a ‘sarcophagus’ because it’s the actual size and shape of a sarcophagus. No way are they gonna let us walk out the door with a giant crate.”

“Depends on the door. Depends on what they see.” Nate had on one of his very smug expressions, high on his own cleverness, a drink in his hand. Eliot scowled. “There is, actually, a second way out of the mountain. They don’t like to use it much, but sometimes circumstances call for extraordinary measures.”

* * *

####  _Ten hours ago:_

“So this is the place where it all, eh, happens, hm?” asked the French rep, peering around with undisguised curiosity. “And that is the actual... Stargate.”

“Yes, sir,” said Landry. “I thought you might want to see—”

He was interrupted by the Indian representative pushing forward, notes of both alarm and scorn in her voice: “This is... what is this all running on? These computers all look like they were built in the 80s!”

“The hardware was assembled for purpose—”

“Our nations pour all this money into this program and—what are you spending it on, if this is the control room?” She gave him a look of angry disbelief. “This is the front line and your security is based on technology decades out of date—”

“The programs they run, ma’am, are—”

“Sergeant—you are a Sergeant? You operate this—no, General, I wish to hear it from him! The programs you run, here, how do they stay up to date? Old programming is notorious! It is—”

“See, I have had this concern all along,” muttered the Russian rep.

“And they have not addressed it yet?” she asked incredulously.

Landry found himself _very calmly_ explaining how the computers ran ten million dollar custom-built software, and were backed up by multi-parallel advanced processing units, and no, they weren’t state-of-the-art, because they had to be proven to not suddenly fail, ever. The Indian rep kept talking to Sergeant Harriman as if for confirmation, which was annoying as hell, but Landry wasn’t going to call her on it, not yet. Something about the way this argument was playing out told him that whatever her agenda was, this wasn’t it, not really. This was a test, an opening feint. He kept his cool, even when she started dragging Captain Maguire into the questions, too.

Outside of the argument, the Chinese rep and the French rep both looked uncomfortable, though the Chinese rep was better at putting a stoic face on it. The French rep shrugged, finally, and shuffled over to the other operator on duty, Sergeant Harris. Landry couldn’t hear the question in its entirety, but he thought the French rep asked something about whether Smithe-Patel had any kind of point. Harris—calm, collected, experienced—could be depended upon to provide a good answer. The Chinese rep stepped closer to hear the conversation.

What Landry didn’t notice was that nobody was facing the gateroom anymore. But then, the ‘gate was inactive, and there were plenty of alarms that would go off if that changed. A deactivated ‘gate didn’t need to be _watched_.

Therefore, nobody was looking when a woman in a labcoat and a man in unmarked BDUs dropped down from the ceiling, landing behind the Stargate. It only took them a handful of seconds to unbuckle their harnesses and kick them under the support structure, and then the woman clicked a remote and the ropes retracted. With only a glance at each other for acknowledgement, the intruders strolled in opposite directions out of the gateroom doors.

There was a ready-room beside each door, with soldiers prepared to pour out and cover the entryway at a moment’s notice if the ‘gate was activated—but, of course, it wasn’t. When the ‘gate was inactive personnel did go into the gateroom semi-frequently for maintenance, scientific readings, or to grab equipment that had gotten left behind. Anyone who had authorization to access Level 28 had authorization to be in the gateroom. The intruders therefore went unchallenged, and, in fact, were completely disregarded and forgotten about by the soldiers who did see them passing.

“ _We’re in,_ ” Parker muttered, subvocalizing as she strode down the hall.

In the control room, the Indian rep continued the argument for another minute before grudgingly allowing the tour to resume.

* * *

####  _Six weeks ago:_

“Is this an alien computer?”

“I did say our contact took home some office supplies.”

“This is an alien computer.” Hardison ran reverent fingers over the burnished metal. “I’m touching an alien computer. A computer made by aliens.”

“Think it might help you get past the SGC’s firewall?”

Hardison managed to tear his gaze away long enough to give Nate a wide-eyed look. Any indignation at the ridiculously monumental nature of what Nate was oh-so-casually asking for was drowned under awe and wonder. Nate had gotten him _an alien computer_. Hardison grinned, gleeful. “I have no idea!”

* * *

####  _Ten hours ago:_

Landry climbed the stairs up to the conference room wearily. The Russian and Indian reps had been snippy at every turn, and that was just the tour. Once they were all sitting down the knives would really come out. He glanced over at the Stargate, visible through feet of bulletproof glass. This was what was at stake, here. This, and all it represented for Earth’s safety. He could handle some pushy bureaucrats.

He stopped in his tracks as he opened the door and a faint but very distinctive bathroom odour wafted out. _Really?_ Today of all days, there had to be some problem with the vents?

For a moment he was tempted just to make them all sit in it.

But while deliberate provocation had its place, in this instance he couldn’t see any way it would actually help him. He turned around, smiled, and ushered the representatives downstairs and toward the elevators, collaring an airman on the way and ordering him to get maintenance up there. They’d use one of the secondary briefing rooms on Level 24.

* * *

####  _Five weeks ago:_

“Don’t think I’m not seeing the big missing piece in these plans you’re cooking up,” said Sophie, sitting down beside Nate with a glass of wine. He was nursing a glass of scotch, himself, and making notes in the execrable scribble that his handwriting devolved into when he wasn’t bothering to make it readable to anyone else. Sometimes—often—she was sure that he wrote that way on purpose.

“Oh?” he murmured, not looking up.

“We’re none of us scientists. Not even Hardison with his new toy.” She glanced over to the far end of the room, where Hardison had been living for the last week. There’d needed to be two interventions already just to get him to eat and shower. “We steal this piece of alien technology because they’re not researching it, but turning it into the something the public can benefit from—how are _we_ going to do that?”

“One step at a time. Our contact”—Nate considered, and then grimaced faintly—“okay, he’s a bit paranoid, but he’s a place to start. We find other researchers, ones not connected to the SGC, set up somewhere they can work—it’s not like we lack for funding, Sophie.”

“That easily? Even our personal fortunes—which I hope you’re not suggesting we use—can’t stand up to the billions that real medical R&D companies spend every year on new products. This is alien technology, it’s got to be more complicated than the next flu vaccine.”

“Then maybe we go out and steal a real medical R&D company.”

“That is _way_ too risky.”

“Depends on what we can find to hold over their heads—look, all of this, it’s in the future.” He waved a hand, setting down his pen. “Until we have the sarcophagus secured, it’s too far out, we can’t plan for it. There’s too many things—we might find other stuff in their labs. They might catch us on camera and we have to relocate to Kazhistan. No. We get the sarcophagus, we see where we’re at, then we move on to stage two.” He paused to take a drink, and then went back to work.

Sophie looked at him, trying not to frown. Hardison hadn’t been the only one trying to work himself to death in the last week. Nate was obsessing over this—just like he always did on cases related to medical care. The way their last job had gone down had no doubt made it worse, but—but what if this took months? Or years? Nate might be expecting miracles, but that didn’t mean he’d get them right away. If he expected them to babysit some greedy pharmaceutical company and make sure they didn’t run off with the priceless alien artifact...

 _One stage at a time,_ she told herself. And later, if she had to slap some sense into Nate, she would.


	2. Chapter 2

####  _Ten hours ago:_

A brush-pass in the hall, and Parker had a new keycard. More doors opened up to her. She opened one—storage—another—there we go. She slipped inside, letting the door shut quietly behind her, and went to the desktop sitting idle over at the side of the room. Out of a pocket came a thumbdrive, and she pushed it into a USB port.

“Drive’s planted,” she reported.

 _Alright, hold tight,_ came the reply, computerized and awful.

Parker scowled. “I don’t like this voice.”

_Yeah, well, I’d get some odd looks if I was saying this out loud right now, wouldn’t I?_

“Doesn’t make it less weird.”

 _Sorry, babe. Okay, I’m in._ There was a pause. _I’m not sure what I’m in, but I’m in. Their setup’s real weird._

“Do you need me to find another computer?”

_I don’t think so. They just really suck at inventorying stuff. Lots of designations, but no descriptions here... give me a minute._

“ _Start looking around, Parker,”_ came Nate’s voice. It sounded muffled, like he was talking into his hands. _“It should be in one of the labs.”_

Parker started to nod, then frowned. “Hey, how come Nate can talk and you can’t?”

_Because he’s not sitting by Sophie and she’s drawing all the aggro right now._

Parker kept her sigh to herself. It was kind of annoying when Hardison used orc-world terms like they were words that real people should know.

* * *

####  _Four weeks ago:_

“So I got good news and bad news,” said Hardison. “Good news, Colorado is heading into a record heat wave, it’s gonna be high nineties this week.”

Eliot looked at him suspiciously. Eliot had been doing that a lot lately. You forget to shower for just _one week_ , and...“Why is that good news?”

“That is good news because,” Hardison turned to Parker, “the bad news is I can’t make those thermo-reflective suits of yours work. Not well enough to mask your heat signature at night, anyway. I can make something that’ll disperse the heat-loss a little bit, sure. Here.” He pulled it out, spreading a pile of shiny cloth across the table.

“A tarp?” asked Eliot.

“Excuse you, this is a highly engineered heat-dispersal garment, designed to defeat highly engineered thermal imagers. Those ain’t just your normal heat detectors up on that mountain, they are full-on IR cameras with advanced profile-detection software. But you walk past one draped in this,” he brandished the garment, “and your heat pattern’ll look random or like a large animal, not a human. The caveat’s that it’ll only work if the ambient’s within a couple degrees of your body temperature. You start talking about ten or twenty degrees lower, and the gradient’s too steep. To fool the camera you’d have to wrap up in this entirely and trap all that heat in there with you. No airflow. Try to do any sort of physical activity like that, you’d drop from hyperthermia in minutes.”

“Mary had a suit that could do it without cooking me.”

Hardison held up a finger. “No, she had a suit she _thought_ could do it without cooking you. I’m pretty sure that is exactly what nearly got you caught, because I’m telling you, unless she had access to some kinda alien tech that I definitely don’t, it ain’t within current human capabilities.”

“Oh,” said Parker, frowning a bit.

Eliot was frowning much harder. “So instead you want us to hike up a mountain in ninety degree weather?”

“In ninety-five degree weather, wearing these fine heat-dispersal garments, carrying fifty pound bags,” Hardison said solemnly.

“You gotta be freaking—”

“Okay!” chirped Parker.

“How is that okay? We’ll cook!”

“We’ll take lots of water, it’ll be fine.”

“There’s something wrong with you.”

Parker grinned at Eliot. “That central shaft is over a thousand yards straight down. _Inside_ a mountain!”

“We’re just going up there to tap their lines, not jump down the hole,” Eliot growled.

“Yet,” said Parker, rubbing her hands together gleefully. “ _Yet_.”

“And how’re we gonna get up there for _that_ without being seen, huh? Your heat wave isn’t gonna last forever, Hardison!”

It was Hardison’s turn to grin. “Hey, man, once my rig’s in place? We might as well all have perma-shroud.”

Parker and Eliot blinked at him.

His grin faded and he rolled his eyes. “We’ll control the in-out. They won’t see anything I don’t want them to see.”

* * *

####  _Nine hours ago:_

“I am concerned about what is coming back through that ‘gate, General. In the confidential papers I have received it seems that every other month there is some ‘foothold’ situation occurring. This speaks to me of a fundamental lack of control. Your technicians, the operators in that room, they do not seem to have an appreciation for the human side of screening—it is all reliance on outdated technology—”

“I understand this is all very new to you, ma’am, but if you’ll let us give you an overview of our security procedures—”

“Not just an overview,” interrupted the Russian rep, who seemed positively enthusiastic, in that dour way bureaucrats got when they thought they had discovered some paperwork loophole that meant they could now make your life hell. Landry barely kept himself from side-eyeing the guy. The Russian rep had been bad enough over the last nine months when he’d been the only major naysayer on the IOA board; with this new Indian rep coming in with the bit already between her teeth, he was getting _far_ too much support. “A detailed examination. We have already taken the time to fly out here and go through that circus upstairs.” The Russian’s eyes narrowed. “It has always seemed to me to be more diligent than what is down _here_.”

“Yes,” the Indian rep agreed. “It is time to look at the details. Speak to personnel.” She smiled coldly.

* * *

####  _Two weeks ago:_

“Nate, man, we got a problem.”

“And a solution?”

Hardison hated that rule. It was a stupid rule. “I dunno. It’s”—Hardison had to close his eyes a moment to contain the unreal giddiness that kept sweeping over him whenever he paused for too long during any part of this job. “It’s the spaceships.”

“We’re not hitting the spaceships. The SGC’s the target.”

“No, no—the spaceships, they’ve got beaming technology! Like Star Trek! Beam me up, Scotty, y’know!” And normally describing problems of this magnitude didn’t make him grin like a little kid, but, what, how was he supposed to not do that when these were the words coming out of his mouth?

Nate switching focus from his ‘coffee’ to laser in on him provided some needed grounding. “You got schematics?”

“Naw, wherever those are, they’re still out of reach. But I’ve been reading the emails going in and out, and the beaming thing’s come up a couple times.”

“Right, right... and why is it a problem?”

“ _Beaming_ technology! What if they get a lock on us? And what kind of sensors do they have that’d let them lock onto a person when they’re in orbit? To do that, they’d have to have pinpoint precision.”

“Or they use some kind of signal,” said Parker, popping up behind Nate. Hardison startled. Nate, annoyingly, didn’t. “Like in Star Trek, they use their communicators.”

“I love you,” said Hardison, beaming, and then, “Okay, but we’re stealing an alien artefact and they won’t have chipped it? The moment they check their inventory, we’re screwed.”

Nate was staring off into space. “Do they have ground-to-ground beaming?”

“It’s only mentioned with the ships, but... there’s no way I can be sure just on what I’ve got.”

“The ships would make more sense. Line of sight, nothing to get entangled in... they still have to obey the laws of physics,” he added dryly, at Hardison’s expression of surprise. Which wasn’t what Hardison’s surprise was about. But Nate did know a lot of random shit, even if at other times he was like Hardison’s Nana trying to write an email. “They don’t have that many spaceships. And they’re dealing with crises across the galaxy every week... keep going through those emails. At some point, if they’re not already, those ships are going to be on missions. We do it then.”

“You sure about that? I mean, if I was in charge of running the war against a bunch of aliens that’d like to wipe out humanity, I sure as hell would be leaving a big fuck-off ship in orbit. I’d leave all the big fuck-off ships in orbit.”

Because, yeah, that was the whole part of finding out about aliens that was... not so great.

“But that’s not how they work, remember?” said Nate. “They’re conducting asymmetric warfare. No, I’ll bet that they’re relying on less powerful defences most of the time.”

“Yeah, well. If you’re wrong, we’re gonna have to figure out how to turn off some alien signal on an alien device on the fly _.”_

“And by we, you mean—” Nate gestured.

“Yeah, I mean me. And, again, that’s assuming they don’t got some kind of freaking all-seeing sensors, in which case we’re just boned.”

“Then we have to assume they don’t.”

“Look, man. I just... I don’t know about this.”

Nate’s attention had turned back to his coffee mug, but at this he looked up again. “Do you need more time?”

“Hell yes. I could study this stuff for the rest of my life and I’d still be figuring stuff out. We’re flying so blind, here.”

“You’ve got access to all their communications. Everything in, everything out.”

“No, no I do _not_. Somebody carries data out on a hard drive, people talking to each other face-to-face—I _do not have_ that. All the regular low-level intel gathering, mapping, testing their defences—all that stuff we can’t do—it makes for a lot of gaps, man.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Nate held up his hands, forestalling the immediate protest. “This job isn’t like other jobs. Other jobs, we’re the enemy, we’re the guys they’re trying to keep out, and we have to pretend to be something else in order to slip around their defences.”

“That is exactly what we’re doing here.”

“No, no. Yes, we’re pretending to be something we’re not, but what we _are_ , is not the enemy. We’re civilians. They don’t need to keep us out; they don’t even think we know about them. Their _enemy_ is on the other side of that gate. All their focus is in that direction. And while they’re focused, utterly, on that direction...” Nate’s gaze shifted slightly, and he grinned.

“Boo,” whispered Parker, _right in Hardison’s ear_.

“Aww, babe, you know I hate it when you do that,” he said, after a short interlude in which he might have jumped but definitely hadn’t shrieked, no sir. He scowled at her. “You just want to go BASE jumping inside a mountain.”

“Damn skippy,” said Parker cheerfully.

* * *

####  _Nine hours ago:_

There were many faces that Teal’c did not expect to see again. Of those, too many belonged to those from whom he had parted with sorrow; heroes caught in desperate situations, soldiers who had laid down their lives, innocents who had been torn away from their homes and families.

Eliot Spencer was the furthest thing from any of those—and yet, here he was, when so many his better never would be again. Such was the way of the universe, and a lifetime of enslavement once would have had Teal’c accept it without question. But the impossible successes he had seen since joining with the Tau’ri had nurtured the defiance within him for too long now.

Teal’c narrowed his eyes and sped up, arriving just as the man pressed the call button for the elevator. “Eliot Spencer.”

The man didn’t startle. Teal’c hadn’t expected him to. He turned only slightly, his eyes flicking up to make eye-contact. “Teal’c.”

“I was not aware you had returned to the Stargate Program.” Unsaid was: _I would have vehemently advised against_ _allowing any such thing._

“Temp gig only. Not expecting to be here long.” Eliot Spencer’s expression was like Teal’c own: totally neutral, revealing nothing.

“There is something requiring... retrieval?”

Eliot Spencer said nothing. The corner of his mouth quirked up in a humourless smirk.

The elevator arrived with a _ding_ and Teal’c stepped away, letting Eliot Spencer step in without blocking him. As the doors closed, Teal’c considered his next step. He was not unaware of the monstrous nature of war, nor of the atrocities that combatants might be driven towards. From his long years of service to Apophis, he could not claim his hands were clean.

But there was that, and then there was what Eliot Spencer had done on P4Q-959, once known to its inhabitants as Mir.

No Tau’ri made it into Stargate Command without General Landry’s personal approval. Teal’c had thought better of Landry’s judgment, but perhaps Landry hadn’t been given all the relevant information. Unfortunately, Landry was distracted with the IOA’s presence on this day—but Teal’c resolved to bring the matter to his attention as soon as the General had a spare moment.

He would see if Landry knew what sort of creature he had allowed to return to Stargate Command.

* * *

####  _Two weeks ago:_

“That’s a terrible idea! They’ll get made in five seconds!” Parker, Hardison got, but he couldn’t understand why Eliot wasn’t objecting to this; he was just sitting there doing his angry-thinking face and listening to this bullshit. And it was bullshit.

“Look, it’s the same reason you dress up as a pizza-delivery guy or a janitor to do basic recon,” said Nate. “That kind of work is invisible. Those people get overlooked all the time.”

“This is a priceless alien artifact! It’s not going to be worked on by the equivalent of the pizza guy!”

“They’re not working on the Stargate, they just need to get in the room. It’s an actively used room, actively used equipment—the gateteams go running back through it fleeing for their lives, being shot at”—Nate was looking at Eliot for support on this, and horrifyingly, Eliot was nodding—“that means that it needs regular repairs, the walls need fixing, the cameras need replacing—whatever. Walk in with a crate marked construction supplies, attach harness, drop lines, attach lines, up you go.”

“It’s the best kind of exit,” said Parker, nodding professionally. “The guards never expect it.”

Hardison growled. “And once we’ve got the giant crate up at the top of the mountain, how the hell are we supposed to get it back _down_ the mountain? You ain’t gonna be able to backpack that shit.”

Eliot and Parker looked at each other. “Skid?” Parker suggested.

Hardison glared at them.

“What? You said you could make us invisible.”

“I am not helping you haul a freaking one-tonne skid down a mountain,” Hardison said firmly.

Eliot rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, nobody was thinking you could.”

* * *

####  _Nine hours ago:_

“...and also second-in-command at the SGC.”

“Sirs,” said Mitchell. “Ma’am’s.”

“I’m sure he is very competent,” said the Indian rep. She didn’t include the sneering tone that he might have expected from the way Landry had fulminously summoned him, but she didn’t give any hint as to what she really thought, either. “But with respect, General, Colonel, I wish to speak to the people on the ground, _here_ , not those who work halfway across the galaxy. I want to talk to the technicians who are doing the screenings, I want to talk to the security personnel, I want to know who, exactly, we are depending on to figure out what is coming through that ‘gate.” Her eyes narrowed. “And then, perhaps, we will discover where things are going wrong.”

And _Landry_ , thought Mitchell, wanted somebody else to have to suffer through this with him. Damn it. He should have asked to go to P2N-983 with Jackson and Vala.

* * *

“Okay, Level 25, clear,” said Parker, keeping her head down. “That’s another big lab _and_ the medical wing. I thought you said it would be on one of the lower levels.”

“ _That was the idea, I’m sure,”_ said Nate, with the fake-accent, which meant he was doubling the conversation for somebody else’s benefit.

 _I’m still trying to figure out their filing system. It would help if I knew what this thing looked like,_ said the creepy not-Hardison voice. _Eliot, can’t you just ask somebody?_

“ _These people really won’t want to talk to me,”_ Eliot muttered.

_Well, you need to hurry it up. Sophie’s got half the officers on base waiting in a line outside this conference room, but even she can’t keep that up all day._

“ _We—we need to hurry it up?_ You _need to hurry it up! You’re the one with the access to the fancy index of alien artifacts!”_

Parker rolled her eyes as she pushed open the next door and entered it. It was a smaller lab than the others, a boxy room with physics-y equipment, but stacked along one wall were several promisingly-sized crates. Even if the thing should be out in the open, not in a crate. But if they weren’t really using it, maybe they had an extra one in storage. And that would make things easier, if it was already in a crate. There was, however, a problem.

“I just don’t know about these numbers, Jake,” said the blond-haired woman with her head half inside of one of the physics-y devices. She extracted it, looked up, and blinked. “Oh, sorry, I thought you were Dr. MacIntyre.”

Parker pursed her lips, put on her best _Nope nothing strange here_ face, and nodded.

“Are you new?” asked Colonel Carter—yep, she looked just like her most recent profile photo that Hardison had grabbed off of the Pentagon servers. Except right now there was a slight crease wrinkling her forehead. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, yes, I’m new. We haven’t met. Before.”

“ _Overdoing it a bit,”_ muttered Nate, without the accent, so that meant he was talking into his hands. Whatever. _“Who’d you meet?”_

 _Sophie said new people are nervous,_ she didn’t retort. _Nervous people babble!_

 _You can be quirky, you can’t be pushy,_ Eliot had said. _Not with one of these people. They don’t get railroaded—their job is liberating planets._

 _You remember being Kelly Beth Laughlin, right?_ Sophie had asked. _Same approach. Bit more grown up. You have a doctorate, you know what you’re doing in your own field... but she is the_ best _at what she does_ , _and you would love to learn from her._

“But I know who you are, Dr. Carter—I mean, Colonel Carter—it’s an honour to meet you,” Parker said, and smiled broadly and stuck out her hand.

“ _Okay, good... now keep an eye on her,”_ said Nate. _“But the search remains priority.”_

* * *

####  _Two weeks ago:_

“Carter’s still their lead scientist? Shit,” said Eliot, squinting at the screen where Colonel Samantha Carter’s unredacted jacket was currently displayed. “She was a legend even when I was there. Did all the technical heavy lifting getting the program running, had a hand in developing all the alien-human interfaces... pretty good right hook, too.”

“Great,” said Hardison. “So she’s probably the best qualified person to take apart my stuff if we end up having to cut and run to Plan G.”

“Plan M,” Nate corrected.

“Don’t I die in Plan M?”

“Mm. Yeah, usually. Not this time. We’ll need your technical expertise too much for you to die.”

“Oh, that just fills me with confidence, that does.”

“Alright. Tertiary objective, we’ll identify where Carter is, we’ll be ready to shove her in a storage closet if we need to. Parker, you’re playing the labrat, that one will be yours.”

Eliot frowned and glanced over at him, then Parker. “I did mention that Carter’s not exactly a pushover in hand-to-hand.”

“But you could take her, right?”

“Of course _I_ could. But—Parker? No offence, but that’s a risk.”

Parker held up her taser and made it go _zap_.

Nate nodded judiciously. Then he smiled, and, yep, creepy. That was how you could tell it was personal with Nate: when he got extra-creepy. “Actually, I think you can probably get something better than that.”

* * *

####  _Nine hours ago:_

“Sir, it is my considered, professional opinion that the situation was not precipitated by a breach of security at the Stargate itself,” said Harriman, his face carefully blank. “I have been in charge of the operation room standards of practice for the last eight years. When teams or visitors arrive from offworld, we have a checklist of—”

“There have been at least nine foothold incursions in the last eight years,” the Russian rep said incredulously. “You’re telling me that it will be fine now, we have checklists?”

“No, sir,” Harriman said firmly. “Many levels of defence are necessary, as we deal with many unknowns. But with the procedures we have in place, we can pinpoint when those defences have failed. In this case, it was not through recent ‘gate activity.”

The Indian rep’s voice was sarcastic as she asked, “Then what defences _have_ been failing?”

* * *

####  _Two weeks ago:_

“Hardison and Eliot, they’re right, you know,” said Sophie, coming up behind Nate as he stood at the counter, pouring himself a whisky. Without looking up he grabbed a second glass and poured one for her, nudging it over toward her. “This job, it’s risky. Past the sheer insanity of it,” and she had to laugh, just a little, because it _was_ insane, it was all insane, “it’s very... very... risky.”

“High risk, ultimate payoff.”

“If we screw up even a little—even if we don’t get caught—they’re going to know it’s us.” She shook her head. “They’ll have our faces. They’ll have all that advanced alien technology looking for us—things even Hardison might not be able to hack.” She made a face at that. “We need more time. We need to step back and rethink this.”

Nate stared into the depths of his glass, swirling the amber liquid like he could find answers there. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet. “And how long do you propose we wait?”

“As long as we need.”

“And if that’s months? Years? And in the meantime, people just keep—” He lifted his glass and gestured, fingers falling open, evoking a falling body.

“Is this about what happened last month?”

He looked up enough to meet her eyes. “What, that thing where you thought I murdered the mark again?”

“No, I mean the part where someone died in front of you, and you couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

Nate snorted. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over a scumbag like that having a heart attack, Sophie. I didn’t _murder_ him, but on the rare occasion where the arc of the universe bends down a little more sharply... I’m not going to cry about it. You know what he was doing to those kids.” He took a sip of whisky, and then a longer one.

“So it really isn’t bothering you at all, then.” She said it with complete sincerity: sharper than any overtly sarcastic tone could be.

“Those kids... they’d still be in that situation, if not for us. A clear-cut case where government should get off its ass and _do something_ , and they do... nothing. The feds knew the compound was there, they knew the kids were there, but they’re so busy keeping secrets, and worrying about optics and politics and who’s got the most damn power—it’s the same thing here. We don’t do this, nobody else is going to do anything.” He drained his glass and set it down, the glass thudding sharply against the wood of the bar. “So, yeah. We can do this. So unlike everyone else, we’re going to do it.”

* * *

####  _Nine hours ago:_

Carter smiled back, just a bit awkward in return as they shook hands. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, too, Doctor...?”

“Kelly. Uh, Doctor Kelly Laughlin. Sorry for just barging in, it’s so easy to get turned around down here. I mean, I got the basic tour, but...” Parker ran out of words. Words. Sophie couldn’t talk to her and feed her lines this time. “What’re you working on?” That was too blunt. Parker put on an enthusiastic expression, then tried an abashed one. “Sorry, that was... probably rude.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” said Carter, her face lightening. She looked more amused than anything. “I’m just checking some of Dr. MacIntyre’s readings, here. We got this artifact off of P8N-331, and at first it seemed like it might be an information storage device, but—” She shrugged. “What’s your doctorate in?”

“Exobiology,” said Parker, and laughed nervously. “Which, let me tell you, has become a lot more exciting since finding out about all... this.”

Carter brightened. “Oh, that’s great! This device, it’s got this cell membrane that Jake thinks is critical to the information exchange. Here, do you want to take a look?”

“Sure,” said Parker, bright grin plastered on.

_No. No, Parker, get out of there, you can’t bluff an expert._

She wanted to hiss at him. Carter was supposed to be a techy-expert, not a biology-expert! She wasn’t supposed to be working on any biology stuff!

“ _You can,”_ murmured Nate. _“You agree with them.”_

“Great,” said Carter, leading her over to the machine. “This is mostly just your basic Toshida lazdot, though we made a couple modifications to the laser focus.”

It was a surprisingly familiar setup. Parker blinked. “You have... a machine to etch diamonds?”

Carter blinked back at her. “Well, sure, but we’ve found it pretty handy at getting pinpoint readings off of cell walls by drastically reducing the laser intensity.”

“Oh. I’d have... never thought of that.”

Carter grinned. “First rule of the SGC, Dr. Laughlin—think outside the box.” She gestured at it. “Take a look?”

“Sure,” said Parker. She stuck her head in the device and squinted. It did _not_ look like a diamond. Crap.

“ _Just get her opinion, then say it back,”_ murmured Nate.

“Say it back,” Parker whispered. “Say it back, say it back.”

“What?” asked Carter.

“Say, uh, where is it you think the information is stored?”

* * *

“Spencer,” said Harriman, expression at first surprised and then quickly going cold as he paused in the middle of the hall.

Eliot nodded to him, and adjusted his planned trajectory to get himself off this level ASAP.

* * *

“...came in via ship, or else having been in stasis, or active on Earth prior to the formation of the program. We’ve seen that before with Setesh.”

“They think this is reassuring,” the Russian rep remarked to the Indian rep. “That there could be any number of goa’uld on Earth just running around, completely unchecked!”

The French rep pushed back his chair and stood, drawing the attention of all of the others except for the Indian rep. He waved them all off as he circled the table to say quietly to Landry, “If one of your airmen can be spared to point the right direction, General, I need a brief recess.”

Landry nodded. “Of course. We can break for fifteen—”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “They seem to be in the, ah, middle of something, here.” Indeed, the Russian rep had already refocused and started grilling Captain Yamani again.

Landry nodded acceptance, and the French rep made his way to the door. When one of the airmen looked in to get confirmation, Landry made a quick _go with him_ gesture with his fingers. He paused, catching the way that Mitchell was staring at the door with unhidden longing, and gave his 2IC the stink-eye until Mitchell snapped back to professional attentiveness.

Then he leaned forward to derail the Russian rep, who was getting totally out of line.

* * *

“Washroom’s this way, sir,” said Airman Schultz.

“No, no, to be honest, I just need a moment to let my ears stop ringing.” The French representative made a face, and Schultz had to fight to keep his face straight. Between the Russian and Indian reps, he hadn’t been having a fun time listening in from his post at the door. Those two short-sighted civilians could threaten the entire program...

“Actually,” said the representative, “Would it be possible to see the, ah, the Stargate again? It was... it looked...” He shook his head. “Unbelievable. It would be nice to be able to see it without all the, you know.” He flapped a hand open-and-closed: _yap yap yap._

Unheard by Schultz, the earbud squawked: _“Nate, what are you doing? We don’t have the sarcophagus yet.”_

“Just a look,” the representative added, smiling with boyish enthusiasm.

The IOA representatives were cleared to go anywhere they wanted so long as they had an escort, and Schultz could practically hear the General growling at him not to make an enemy of a friendly civilian who had one hand on the purse-strings. And anyway, the rep was right: the Stargate was damn cool, and if the other IOA reps didn’t see that, then they were blind. Schultz was happy to show off for the one who did see. “Of course, sir. This way.”

* * *

“...Which is why we have an active program to locate and hunt down any goa’uld that makes its way to Earth,” Landry finished firmly. “Dr. Suliman has been instrumental in developing it. Doctor, please explain.”

“Ah, right. The program was initially developed to model archaeological and historical narratives that fit known goa’uld behaviour and therefore identify those that may have been active on Earth for some time, like Setesh. With a broader range of data and assistance from a wide number of national and international watchdogs, we further developed the criteria for screening known cults, including...”


	3. Chapter 3

“ _Parker, I need a zat.”_

Parker blinked, and almost lost the thread of what Carter had been saying. That wasn’t in any of the plans. She was still frowning as Carter looked at her.

“Really?” she blurted.

 _Nate, what are you doing?_ asked Hardison.

Carter raised her eyebrows slightly. “Well, yes, that is how... a cell wall works.”

“ _No time. Trust me. Parker, zat Carter, then get down here.”_

“ _She’ll blow her cover!”_ protested Eliot.

Too many people talking at once. There was a suspicious frowny-wrinkle on Carter’s face. “...alright, Dr. Laughlin?”

“I—no, no, I’m sorry,” Parker said in a rush. “I just, uh, I really didn’t sleep well, last night, I was just... so excited about all this. Maybe I just was seeing... but maybe you should take another look? I just, what I was seeing in there... here, take a look,” she said, herding Carter back toward the lazdot machine.

“Alright,” said Carter, frowning still more, her voice low and slow in that way that meant Parker had screwed up and somebody was about to call her out and she’d lose her cover, except Parker was mostly behind her now and Carter glanced one last time at the machine, which was really all the opportunity Parker needed to pull the zat out of a pocket and fire.

“Ow!” Parker yelped, as Carter crumpled. She shook out her fingers, where she’d been touching Carter’s elbow. “Ow, ow, ow!” Blue light sparked around her fingertips and went away. “Oo.” That was pretty cool. Even if it stung like a hundred bee-stings.

The door clicked open. Parker whirled, and saw a short man with a beard and thick glasses gaping at the scene: her with an alien ray-gun, their lead scientist unconscious on the floor.

“What the—”

_Zap!_

“Sorry,” said Parker, jumping forward to grab him and pull him inside, and get the door shut. Then she looked over to Carter, and said again, “Sorry.” Carter seemed nice. She didn’t deserve a hundred bee-stings.

“ _How’s that zat coming, Parker?”_ Nate muttered.

She grabbed the man’s arms again and dragged him over to the crates. Some of them were open—and, aha, there was an empty one. Crouching, she got her weight under the guy and lifted up, up, dumping him over and in. Then she went back for Carter to give her the same treatment, which was much easier, although Carter still weighed enough that she had to be a lot more muscle-y than she looked.

“Sorry,” she whispered again, and moved the lid back into place.

* * *

“You explained all this before,” said the Russian rep. “During the emergency session we had right after the incident. It was insufficient then, it is insufficient now!”

“My predecessor didn’t leave very good notes on what was discussed at that meeting,” said the Indian rep, her eyes narrowing. “Do catch me up. This session occurred... seven weeks ago?”

“Yes,” said the Russian rep. “Right after they found out that they _lost_ another goa’uld.”

* * *

“That sure is something,” said the French rep, staring at the Stargate. He’d taken his time in looking at it, marvelling over the alien construction, looking at Schultz for permission before reaching out and laying a hand on it. “Any chance we’ll see it activated?”

“Possibly, sir. We should have a couple teams returning this afternoon.”

“At the rate they’re going we’ll certainly still be here by then,” the rep cracked, and shook his head. “That will be something to see, I’m sure. Hm. You really run it all off of that set-up in the control room? Not to be condescending, but I have to admit Representative Smithe-Patel had a point about it looking very outdated.”

“It’s a pretty advanced set-up, sir,” said Schultz. “Would you like another look? One of the on-duty operators could probably explain it a bit more, uh, easily, now.”

“Sure,” said the French rep.

On their way out of the gateroom, they were bumped into by a woman in a lab coat, her head bent over a clipboard. Schultz frowned after her, but the representative didn’t seem to take any offence, so he let it go, and led the way around to the stairs up into the control room.

“Bit of a roundabout path, here.”

“Yes, sir. It’s designed to protect the control room. Any intruder trying to get from the gateroom to the control room has to go past those guards.”

“Very smart.” He looked up and down the hallway. “Seems much quieter than it was earlier.”

Schultz managed not to snort. “We’ve been calling people up to 24 all morning, sir. To talk to, er, you.”

The French rep did snort. Schultz found himself reluctantly liking the guy. “Yes, Smithe-Patel and Vlasov certainly are keen on interrogating personnel.”

* * *

“The program worked as intended,” protested Dr. Suliman. “It successfully identified characteristic goa’uld operations—not just in a known identified cult, but in a modern multi-level marketing corporation. We uncovered a number of shell companies and positively identified the goa’uld Bes as the actual controlling entity in the corporation, then physically located him in one of his shell-companies in Utah.”

“And then you lost him,” spat the Russian rep. “It’s been seven weeks and you still haven’t found him.”

“We have uncovered evidence that there may have been some kind of internal power struggle, possibly initiated by those unaware of the true nature of their leader,” said Landry. “The goa’uld killed and abandoned its former host only hours before we stormed the compound—he was indoctrinating children under the guise of a summer camp,” he explained for the Indian rep’s benefit. The mention of children got a shocked look from her—the first time she’d seemed something other than smug, cold, or outraged. “We have since managed to MRI every high-ranking member of the corporation, but working through the full employee list will take time.”

“None of this would have happened if they were more careful about who they allow on Earth,” said the Russian rep to the Indian rep.

“We have determined that Bes did not gain access to Earth through a breach in modern Stargate security,” Landry reiterated.

“Wait,” said the Indian rep. “Let me get this straight. You found this goa’uld on Earth... living as some CEO at the head of a multinational, multi-level marketing corporation... one with a sideline in running abusive summer camps—in Utah. Then he mysteriously died—or, the host mysteriously died. So the alien, now, could be anyone—could be controlling anyone. Likely, the last person who saw the old CEO alive. And now you can’t... _find him._ ”

Her assistant was staring at her in horror.

* * *

Eliot stopped in his tracks.

Then he started to run.

* * *

Two hallways away and one floor down, so did Parker.

* * *

“It is very much a sight,” said the French rep appreciatively as he looked out the control-room windows. Then he smiled. “Better appreciated when one does not have _this_ going on.” He made the _yap yap yap_ gesture again.

Schultz let himself grin. “Yes, sir.” It was only them and the two second-shift operators here right now—with no offworld activations scheduled for the next few hours, General Landry had called up most of the primary staff to be ready to answer any of the IOA’s questions.

“Huh,” said the French rep. “What’s that?”

“What’s what, sir?”

“That,” said the French rep, frowning and pointing out the window at something to the left of the ‘gate.

Schultz looked. “I’m not sure I—arrrgk!”

The zat flashed twice more before he hit the ground, and the two operators collapsed out of their chairs.

* * *

The lights flickered and died.

“What in the—”

“What’s happening?”

A bang echoed in from outside—a door slamming shut, as all the stairwell doors would in the event of a lockdown. But the lights didn’t go out during a lockdown. What in the hell?

“Airman Teague,” Landry called, “get on your radio and get me a sitrep.”

Mitchell stood as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, stepping around and away from his chair so he wouldn’t trip over it in the dark. The only source of light in the room was the laptop screen of the Indian rep’s assistant. It reflected off of the young man’s face, showing him looking frightened, but very intent as he stared at his screen.

Emergency power kicked on belatedly, and they had partial light again.

“What is going on here?” demanded the Russian rep. He’d jumped out of his seat, and was now trying to loom over the table. Mitchell gave him a half-second look-over and mentally dismissed him. The Chinese rep had also gotten to her feet, and was frowning hard at him—alternating that with frowning at the Indian rep, who was staring in horror at the screen of her assistant’s laptop. Her assistant was typing furiously.

Typing... much in the same manner that Carter typed when she was under the crunch.

“Mr. Sanyal,” Mitchell said, dropping one hand to his side-arm. “Step away from the laptop.”

Sanyal glanced up, but didn’t pause in his furious typing. “I—what?”

“Mitchell,” said Landry, eyes narrowing as he took in the situation.

“Think we’ve got a security breach here, sir.”

“What is going on?” demanded the Indian rep, voice shaky. The assistant glanced at her, then bit his lip, looking back at his laptop.

“Get your hands up or I will have you shot,” said Landry, and that was permission for Mitchell to draw his gun and raise it, though he kept the safety on. At his back, he could hear the two airmen at the door moving to cover him, while the astonished delegates backed away.

“Ravi,” said the Indian rep, voice gone soft with shock. “ _Ravi_ , what have you done?”

He shot her a look full of guilt and fear. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Mitchell holstered his gun and leaned across the table, grabbing the laptop and turning it. That was... definitely not a note-taking page up on the screen. What it was, he had no idea. “We need Carter up here, sir.”

“Radio her,” said Landry, voice hard. “You. You’re going to tell me what the target is. Right now.”

* * *

Parker slipped into the control room just before the lights went out. In the dark, she felt the sudden heavy thud of its door slamming shut, locking her in, hurting her ears. She winced and breathed very, very quietly.

“ _Parker?”_ hissed Eliot. _“Parker, where are you?”_

She didn’t answer. In front of her, illuminated by the glow of a single rebooting computer screen, was Nate. Or, well. Maybe Nate. Maybe Not-Nate. Like Evil-Nate, except... really, _really_ evil. She wished it _was_ just Sterling standing there.

The computer finished rebooting and Nate, Not-Nate, started typing. There was a rumbling sound, a feeling, one that resonated up from the soles of her feet, and out in the dark space beyond the control room window, something orangy-red and alien lit up. Parker squinted, and a moment later figured it out. It was one of the control bits on the stargate.

Not-Nate was trying to open the stargate. He was trying to get off of Earth. He was trying to kidnap Nate.

The lights came back on in the control room. Not-Nate glanced up at them, glanced back down, and froze. In the reflection of the main window, their eyes met.

He turned, smiling. It wasn’t one of Nate’s creepy smiles. It was a perfectly ordinary smile and it was a thousand times creepier for that, especially as he was standing surrounded by three crumpled bodies that she could only see now that the lights were back on, and she couldn’t tell if any of them were still breathing. Then his eyes flashed, glowing from the inside out, and that was another thousand times even _more_ creepy.

“ **You have a talent for appearing and disappearing,”** he said, and that was wrong, too, it was a dozen old men all talking in one voice coming out of Nate’s mouth. **“I could make use of that.”**

“ _Parker, get out of there!”_

“Not an option,” she blurted. Not-Nate kept smiling, and Parker stepped forward, grabbed a chair, and heaved it at him. He caught it like it weighed nothing and threw it aside, but by then she was already in close, darting her hand toward the alien raygun that she’d given him, that he’d left lying on the desk beside the computer—

A hand seized her wrist with crushing force and squeezed, hard enough to make her gasp. She could feel her bones creak. Yanking away did nothing; she kicked at his knee instead, but it was like kicking a cement wall. Another hand closed on her upper arm and then she was the object being thrown through the air. One of the computer banks got in her way, hard enough to knock the wind out of her.

Blue light poured into the room, through the window. From her position gasping on the floor, Parker couldn’t see what was causing it, but she had more immediate problems anyway. Not-Nate had picked up the raygun and was pointing it at her.

She froze, everything except her eyes, looking for a way out.

“ **Not useful enough,”** said Not-Nate.

Then all she could see was crackling blue light, and _painpainpainpainpain—_

* * *

“I didn’t know,” said Sanyal. “I think—I didn’t know, I _swear_ I didn’t—”

“You didn’t know _what?_ ” shouted Mitchell.

“I think, uh, Dujardin—I think he’s been taken over by the goa’uld.”

Mitchell turned to Landry. “The ‘gate. It’s gotta be. He’s trying to get offworld.”

The Indian rep pressed her hands to her mouth, muttering something that sounded like a prayer.

* * *

The goa’uld known as Bes dismissed the interruption as soon as it was no longer a threat to his plans. In his ear, he could hear the hacker, desperately pleading that he hadn’t meant to, he could fix it. Good. If he was under suspicion, then he would not be free to counter any of Bes’s moves. Not that he would be able to do so in any case. There were a number of tricks to goa’uld viruses that the hacker would never have thought of, not in the paltry few weeks Bes had allowed him to explore the technology. Bes clicked open a command line, quickly gained access to the cascading failure program that he’d told the hacker to write, and smiled as he glanced over some of the lines that the hacker wouldn’t have understood the full meaning of. A few quickly entered commands ensured that the hacker would be stymied, even if he managed to persuade the other tau’ri that he was innocent. Then Bes located the doors he needed, and ordered them open. He stood, looked once out at the glimmering chappa’ai, then turned and made his way out, through the now unlocked control room door and down the steps.

He smiled again as he passed one of the tau’ri’s ridiculous guardposts, hearing the sound of argument and a thudding against the door. The tau’ri built their doors too strong, and their control systems not strong enough. Ahead, the door into their gateroom stood open, and beyond that, the wormhole. Freedom, from this backwater planet.

And once he was free, he would rebuild, and then he would make Ba’al pay for abandoning their alliance and leaving him behind.

* * *

“I can undo it,” said Sanyal. His hands were still raised. “I didn’t know what he was planning, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Let me undo it.”

“Control room’s not responding, sir,” reported an airman. “But everyone on 27 and 28 is reporting a total lockdown.”

On those levels, the doors that closed were several feet of solid steel. No, they needed Carter, to figure out whatever _this_ was—Mitchell stared at the screen in frustration. Stuff this advanced, it might as well be gibberish to him. Why the hell wasn’t she responding?

“Let him try,” blurted the Indian rep. “You must. Or this goa’uld will escape—it will take an innocent man with him!”

“Are you insane?” demanded the Russian rep.

“Please,” said Sanyal. “I don’t want that. I don’t. I swear.”

* * *

Eliot kept his breathing slow and steady, inaudible over the rippling of the active ‘gate. Parker—Parker would be okay. She had to be okay. He’d only heard the one shot. (It had fried her comm. Would he have heard the second shot? No, she was just stunned. She’d be fine. She had to be.)

The right-hand door unlocked with a thud and swung open. Eliot pressed himself against the wall, still invisible from the observation window above him. Footsteps echoed. Eliot located them in his head, and eased sideways into place in the shadow of the door.

The goa’uld strode through into the gateroom, zat held loosely in its right hand.

Eliot slammed his booted foot into the goa’uld’s hand, breaking its grip and dropping the zat to the floor. A followup kick sent the zat spinning away under the ‘gate platform, lost in the darkness. Securing the weapon cost him: he didn’t quite get out of the way as the goa’uld turned on him, punching him hard enough to throw him into the wall. _Shit_. Eliot had sparred with Teal’c, he’d gotten the briefing on how strong the goa’uld were, knew they were stronger than the jaffa—he’d _prepared_ for this, but he’d never had to do it before.

Time to put preparation into practice.

He stumbled and caught his balance, refusing to give in to the rabbit-y panic of his brain noticing that he couldn’t breathe, or the pain of that definitely broken floating rib. Instead he circled, getting his hands up, and getting himself between the open Stargate and the thing that had hijacked one of his team. His diaphragm stopped freaking out and he drew in a deep, ragged breath.

“ **Are you going to fist-fight me?”** the goa’uld asked, sounding amused and so god-awful wrong, wearing that face.

“That’s kinda my thing,” said Eliot. “Did you kill Parker?”

The goa’uld smiled, malicious beyond anything Nate had ever managed. **“I considered it. But I felt that would be a waste.”**

Relief was like another punch to the gut. “A waste?” asked Eliot, because time the goa’uld spent talking was more time for Eliot to get his breath back, and he could really use some more air.

“ **Of... hmm, how is it he says it? Leverage.”**

The burn of anger rose higher. Eliot let it, taking the strength it gave him. The goa’uld seemed to realize this, and smiled. Yeah, keep on smiling, fucker.

The SGC had never managed to successfully pull a goa’uld out of a host without killing the host, not when he’d served here before. But Eliot was going to damn well _make_ them, and then he was going to kick Nate’s ass for this. They’d manage it. If anyone could think his way out of dying, it was Nate.

“ **It has been very strange, having a host that is worth keeping... aware—let alone a host worth _talking_ to.”** The goa’uld said it as if it were a true marvel. **“Most are useless. A few memories of value, an understanding of whatever passes for culture in the current day-and-age... but this one kept _thinking_ , in such a valuable fashion. Planning.”**

“Yeah. Nate does that.”

“ **I came to understand what a service your crew could provide to me... and with certain leverage, he was quite willing to go on thinking, scheming, toward my benefit. After all”** —the goa’uld spread its hands— **“now, it was his benefit, too.”**

Forget kicking Nate’s ass, Eliot was just gonna flat-up murder him.

Eliot was gonna beat this snake into the ground, and make the SGC pull it out of Nate’s head, and rescue all of them from custody, and once they were all safe and sound and de-snaked and hiding somewhere far away, Eliot was gonna murder him so bad that he was never gonna consider one of those stupid twisty backhanded plans where he _stayed alone in the room with the mark_ again.

And then Eliot was gonna make Hardison stick five million button cameras on him. On all of them.

“ **It could be to your benefit as well.”**

That... wasn’t out of the usual goa’uld playbook. “What?”

The goa’uld gestured toward the ‘gate. **“The galaxy awaits. Come with me. Be my First Prime. You have skills, Eliot Spencer, ones that are wasted on this isolationist little world. With you, I could create an empire worthy of the glory days of old, put down these... petty rebellions. Yoke the future to a proper _vision_. You would lead armies. Tell me, do you not _crave_ something more than this? A true challenge? A true _fight_?” **

Eliot nodded, slowly, certain in the knowledge that if Nate had been feeding this guy plans, he definitely wasn’t any more.

It probably showed on his face, because the goa’uld dropped its hands, assuming an air of nonchalance. **“Of course, there would also be the benefit to your friends. They would be permitted to live. And I wouldn’t grind Nathan Ford’s mind into a thousand screaming, fractured neurons, fit for no higher thought than a worm’s.”**

Oh. Shit.

_It’s a bluff. Gotta be a bluff._

It didn’t matter if it wasn’t a bluff. The goa’uld never kept their promises. Eliot had only been with the Stargate program for a couple weeks, but it’d been long enough to learn that. It’d been long enough to learn that even if the SGC couldn’t pull the snake out, letting him go... was not the better option.

_Nate, man, I’m sorry._

“That’s, uh, that’s quite an offer,” said Eliot, and gave the goa’uld a smile of his own. “But I’m going to have to decline.”

“ **Pity,”** said the goa’uld, as Eliot darted forward to strike.

* * *

Sam woke up in the dark with a too-familiar headache, and groaned. Zat hangover. Crap. What had... where was she? There had been that new doctor, Laughlin, who was weirder than even the SGC’s usual weird, and had seemed to be zoning in and out constantly, and then... damnit.

She was lying on something warm and squishy and—breathing. Another person. Great. Trying to roll off just fetched her up against the wall of wherever-she-was. She put a hand out against it, and felt wood. A quick rap with her knuckles produced a hollow sound that made her headache flare.

Dark, thin wood, cramped space—she was in a crate.

Sam growled low in her throat, reached up, and shoved the top of the crate off. It hadn’t been nailed shut, and it shifted a lot easier than she had expected, falling away and clattering against the floor. She stood, glancing down and confirming—it was MacIntyre that she’d been dumped on top of, not Laughlin. Which definitely kept Laughlin at the top of the suspect list. But what was Laughlin trying to do? Nothing good, if the fact that the lights had switched to emergency mode meant anything.

She climbed out of the crate and stumbled for the intercom, jamming the button. Static only. And the door was locked—this was a lockdown. Damn it. Her next stop was her radio. She switched it on and immediately got chatter:

“— _torches will make the cut in tw_ _o hours_ _, sir.”_

“— _need access to B27 to get those supplies, Sergeant—”_

She hit the button and reported in. “This is Carter, we have an intruder.”

“ _Carter!”_ That was Mitchell. _“Where the hell are you?”_

“MacIntyre’s Lab on 23. I got zatted.”

“ _You secure now? We need you to lift the lockdown.”_

Oh, no. She circled the table swiftly, getting to the computer—its screen was dead, and it didn’t want to reboot. She set the radio down beside her as she dropped down to the floor to do something about that. “Do you know what caused it?” Because if they needed _her_ to lift it...

“ _Some of our IOA guests are not what they seem,”_ Mitchell said grimly. _“One of them’s a goa’uld, we think he’s trying to get out through the ‘gate. The other uploaded some kind of computer virus to cause the lockdown—oh, sorry, he says he_ built _a virus, but he never meant for this to happen and he’s really very sorry.”_ And that was as sarcastic as even Jack could have managed.

Sam scrambled to her feet and stared at the now-lit screen. She tried a few commands, and stared at the results. Her eyes narrowed. “Put him on the radio.”

“ _Carter—”_

“I can take this apart in half an hour. Or he can tell me what he did, and I can take it apart faster than that.”

* * *

Eliot had practised for fighting against aliens. A lot. He’d fought a lot of them, too, during that brief period in his life eight years ago. Mostly humans. Some Jaffa. He’d never gotten to fight an Unas, nor a goa’uld.

He was regretting that particular lack of practical experience now.

There were plenty of guys out there who were stronger than him, guys who could floor him with one punch if he let them hit him the wrong way, in the wrong location. He knew how to deal with that, knew how to take a hit and roll with it and bounce back, knew how to use leverage—not Nate’s sort of leverage, the sort of leverage involving bones and ligaments and the pieces of the human body that didn’t want to be bent, or couldn’t be bent without breaking.

The goa’uld was different. The goa’uld didn’t give a shit about a torn ligament in its hand, just snarled and punched Eliot again, hard enough to break another rib. He couldn’t force its limbs into a hold, couldn’t deflect enough of the force of its blows, not when that force was _so much more_ than any human being could generate. He could shove it off-balance—he’d gotten it in a tackle, sending it flying back down the ramp, away from the ‘gate, when it’d nearly gotten too close—and joints were still joints, mostly, or at least he could take advantage of the weakest ones—but the learning curve was punishingly steep.

Too steep. Two steep? He was seeing double. And the giddiness probably meant a concussion. Damnit.

The goa’uld hit him again, throwing him ten feet onto his back on the metal grate.

Eliot breathed.

Footsteps echoed off of the grating, approaching. Eliot looked up at the goa’uld, standing over him, mostly uninjured, aside from the smear of blood beneath its nose from when Eliot had managed to headbutt it. It’d tossed Eliot aside then, too, set Nate’s nose with a crack, and finally stopped smirking.

“ **A waste,”** said the goa’uld. **“But one that I will enjoy indulging in.”**

Overhead, the lights switched back on to full power.

The goa’uld paused. Eliot didn’t. He kicked up, ignoring the pain in his ribs, in his stomach, and tangled the goa’uld’s legs with his own, shifting their combined weight and throwing the goa’uld off-balance. Caught, the goa’uld fell, but immediately broke the hold with a brute force that Eliot just couldn’t match. It shoved up from the grating and then _at_ him, and suddenly its fingers were around Eliot’s throat, squeezing. Eliot wheezed out one breath and couldn’t get any more air in. He punched it in the face—in the nose again—but his aim was off; he was pretty sure he hit a cheek instead. He tried to raise a knee to the goa’uld’s gut, but it didn’t have the force it should have.

“ **Yes,”** whispered the goa’uld, its sibilant hiss and the sound of his own hammering pulse the only two things Eliot could hear. Its eyes flashed with sadistic pleasure, and Eliot was almost glad, because that made the face alien, and at least it wasn’t a friend. **“Enjoy very much...”**

Blue light washed over it, and it crumpled on top of Eliot, grip loosening.

He gasped for breath and shoved free, rolling aside. Where had—what—no, it was still moving, pulling itself up with a groan, and—

A second hit of blue light, and it went still.

It. In _Nate’s_ body. Eliot stared, horrified.

 _One—it hurts. Stuns, usually_. _Two kills, always._

 _One bullet’ll kill, always,_ Eliot had replied, eight years ago. _If you do it right._

He looked up to see Teal’c standing in the doorway, with soldiers fanning out in a semi-circle behind him, half of them pointing very lethal P90s at Eliot, half of them pointing at—at Nate.

“You,” said Eliot. He stopped, spit out a mouthful of blood. “You... shot him twice.”

Teal’c raised an eyebrow. “Goa’uld are often not stopped by the first stun.”

“So you killed him.”

“No. This is not a zat’nik’tel, Eliot Spencer.”

Eliot blinked at him. It felt like it was very hard to get the information to sink into his brain. He could see that what Teal’c was holding wasn’t a zat, but he had no idea what it was, other than alien. Looking over at Nate’s body didn’t clarify anything. His vision was blurry. He couldn’t see if Nate was breathing still, if it was real. He scrabbled toward Nate, reaching to try and check for a pulse.

Teal’c must not have liked that, because the next flash of blue was all over Eliot’s vision, and then there was nothing to see at all.


	4. Chapter 4

#### Eight hours ago:

“Tara!” Parker whispered. “Tara, I need your help. Usual fee plus ten percent, plus expenses, we need you _now_.”

“ _Alright, alright, you got my attention. What’s the game?”_

* * *

#### Three weeks ago:

“Can we take these stupid things off yet?” asked Eliot, trying not to gasp for air.

“ _Not yet.”_

“It’s not that bad,” said Parker, from where she was lying next to him. There was a listless note in her voice that made Eliot look over in concern. She’d been practically bouncing all the way up the mountain, despite being likewise draped in a fifty-pound tarp ( _tarp._ He didn’t care what Hardison called it, he didn’t care if Hardison had painted it up in camo, he didn’t care if it was engineered nano-super-science, it was a twelve-foot piece of stiff fabric that caught on every fucking branch and rock), climbing a mountain in near-hundred-degree weather. But beneath its _too goddamn hot_ hood, her face was just as bright red as Eliot’s. Only she wasn’t anywhere near as sweaty as him.

...Actually, she wasn’t sweaty at all. Just flushed. Shit.

“Hardison, we’re out of time,” said Eliot, sitting up and crawling over to Parker. He fumbled for her pack, pulling out one of the many, many water bottles they were both carrying—damn it, too many of hers were still full.

“ _I don’t know if I got control of all the exterior sensors—”_

“Get control! Parker’s got heatstroke, she needs this off now.”

“Parker’s what?” Parker asked groggily.

“ _Okay, okay, just—gimme thirty more seconds here—”_

If they were discovered up here, sitting on top of Cheyenne Mountain beside a piece of alien technology that they’d just finished hooking into the SGC’s main trunkline, _literally_ a hundred yards away from the entrance to that primary shaft, they were fucked. The SGC knew Eliot, they’d know he knew what he was doing, and Parker would go down with him. Eliot dug deeper through the kit, grabbing the chemical cold packs and breaking two, shaking them rapidly. “Hardison...”

“ _Alright, I got ‘em all, I got ‘em.”_

Eliot ripped the helmet off of Parker’s head, then dragged her tarp off, and unceremoniously stuck the cold packs underneath her armpits. Ignoring her squawks at that, he opened the water bottle and poured half of it over her head, then thrust it under her nose. “Sip this. No, _sip,_ ” he said, and took it away when she tried to gulp.

“My head hurts,” she complained.

Eliot pulled off his own tarp and balled it up, looking around for the nearest patch of shade—which, this high up, was in short supply. “No fucking kidding. I told you this was a terrible idea!”

* * *

#### Seven hours ago:

Mitchell set a fresh cup of coffee next to Carter’s elbow. She kept typing for a few more seconds, then looked up, rubbing her eyes before picking up the coffee and smiling in thanks. Caffeine made for the best zat-hangover cure. Carter had been the one to tell him that, back when he’d first started getting zatted on a regular basis.

They were damn lucky that she had so much experience with it—the effect tended to wear off quicker the more times you’d gotten hit with it in the past. Mitchell would have lobbied for regular resistance training if it wasn’t so damn painful. Well, that, and the docs still weren’t sure it wouldn’t cause long-term brain damage, although if Carter was any indication it was just as likely to make somebody smarter.

“All the rest of our guests have been MRI’d and certified snake-free,” Mitchell said lightly. He nodded down at the computer. “How’s it going?”

“Slow,” she admitted, taking a sip of the coffee. “We got the effects contained, but rooting it out entirely will take time. This kid’s good.” She stared at her screen intently. “I’m pretty sure he’s the same person who tried to hack us three years ago.”

“I don’t remember reading about that.”

“It wouldn’t have been in the team’s mission reports. It was a security breach—somebody tried accessing the SGC through our connection to the Pentagon’s servers.” His eyebrows raised, and she smiled again at him, looking amused at his reaction. “The program’s become a pretty popular target—it happens. The ones that get too close, we backtrace, and... usually end up hiring, to be honest. Then they get to try and catch the next bunch. But three years ago, they had somebody get away.” She held up a finger to the code she’d been reading. “This guy’s code is the same style. A bit better—leaner, mostly. And he’s learned some goa’uld. But I’d lay money it’s the same guy.”

Mitchell drummed his fingers against the desk. “His background checked out. So did his boss’s. Of course, so did Dujardin’s...”

“Someone this good could easily make an ironclad electronic profile.”

“Yeah, but,” Mitchell waved a hand, “These people are high-level government officials. People talk to them—over the phone, in person. They’re all vouched for by other people in their national governments.”

* * *

#### One week ago:

“This feels very... backward,” said Sophie, jerking her head away from the scanner at the last minute. It beeped discordantly as the scan failed to take. “Wouldn’t it be better to just fake something?”

Nate sighed. “Think of it like—getting a new passport or driver’s licence.”

“Those don’t require a photograph of my eyeball! I can change my appearance, I can’t change... this.”

“Yeah, that’s the point,” said Hardison, rolling his eyes as he reset the scanner. “That’s why they do it.”

“But if you can hack into their system to put our profiles in there—”

“I’m not hacking the SGC system for this. I’m hacking the Indian government. They’re the ones expected to transmit the biometric data, with authorization from all those people you’ve been pretending to be on the phone for the last two weeks.” Hardison clicked a last few keys, and the scanner beeped ready again. “How many times do I have to explain, I cannot hack the SGC internal systems from outside. We intercept what’s going in, what’s going out, and that’s it.”

“Well what even was the point of Parker and Eliot climbing up that mountain, then?” Sophie groused.

“Securing our exit,” said Eliot. He’d been watching the proceedings—even though he and Parker didn’t need to have invasive pictures taken of their eyeballs, it had somehow turned into a team event.

“They did that so I could _get_ what was going in and out. Look, I appreciate y’all’s faith in me, but I am, while godly, not actually god. And they... they got a good setup.”

Parker leaned forward and put her elbow on one knee, chin on her palm. “Can you get it out of their system again? After?”

“I... maybe?”

“It’ll be fine,” Nate broke in. “Look, it’s like you said. A passport doesn’t require this. Getting entrance to a country doesn’t require this, pretty much nowhere requires this. Nobody’s going to be looking for you with it. They don’t have the capability to check it.”

“It’s sloppy,” said Parker.

“They’re still going to have all this information. What if they run it through one of those government databases, huh? You’ve got a criminal record, Nate!”

“Wiped criminal record, actually,” Nate said mildly.

“And we’re all in Interpol’s database, not to mention whatever the CIA has—”

“Those databases, I _can_ take care of,” Hardison said firmly. “I hit delete, I edit, it all goes away.”

“You can do that?” asked Eliot.

“Can I—of course I can do that. I can get in to the databases whenever I please, _yes_ I can edit them.”

Parker frowned. “Why haven’t you already?”

“I _do_ edit them. Discreetly. Paper copies are a thing that exist.” Hardison frowned. “And also Sterling checks our entries every week or two.”

“Ugh—”

“Really?”

“I _hate_ that guy—”

“Focus,” Nate said absently. “Hardison, when was the last time he checked?”

“Nine days ago?”

“Alright. Then we’re going to stall. Hardison, tell me as soon as he checks again, then wipe out our entries, send your data, wait a day or two, then send mine. We’ll reschedule the meeting if we have to, make sure it’s in the window. I don’t want him sending up flags on us.”

“Nate, we wait too long, I don’t know that those spaceships are going to be in the same position still.”

“No... if Sterling leaves it too long, it’ll bug him. Once he’s in the habit, he’d be wondering what he missed. He’ll check soon.—Oh, don’t wipe Eliot’s files. Just... creatively edit. Clear out the last couple years.”

“Hey,” said Eliot.

“They do know you,” Sophie pointed.

“But you’ll wipe my files, right?” asked Parker.

“Girl, you barely have files, just a whole lotta speculation,” said Hardison. Then he frowned again. “Except Interpol’s.”

They all sighed.

“Right,” said Nate after a moment. “Sophie, eye-scan. Let’s get this done.”

* * *

#### Seven hours ago:

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“Something you just said...” Carter shook her head. “I keep getting caught on Laughlin. She doesn’t fit. If Sanyal could secure a profile for himself, why not one for her, too?”

“Maybe he’s not _that_ good?”

Carter shook her head. “He’s definitely that good. He hasn’t said anything about her?”

“Nothing. Not a peep about Spencer, either. Mostly he’s been apologizing and asking for a lawyer.”

Carter frowned.

“Hey.” He touched her shoulder. “We’ll find her.”

“We never should have lost her.” Carter grimaced, and Mitchell echoed it. During the chaos of dealing with the virus, Carter had been fully occupied first trying to break the lockdown, and then with containing the virus. By the time she’d surfaced from the code long enough to give a description of the person who’d zatted her, the personnel found unconscious in the control room had all been taken to medical... and one of those people, a blond woman wearing a labcoat, had managed to disappear.

“The doors upstairs aren’t opening until we find her, and we’ve got teams going level-by-level.” And multiple armed guards at every door. “We’ll get her.”

“I can’t even get a photograph of her,” Carter said moodily. “Sanyal’s program totally wiped out the cameras for those two hours.”

“You can’t reconstruct the data?”

“Not if there’s no data to reconstruct.” Carter gestured at the computer with frustration. “I don’t understand why Sanyal didn’t just put her into the system like he did himself. He was good enough to be able to do it. You’re sure the guys at the front door said she didn’t come through that way?”

“There aren’t that many blond-haired women who work here,” said Mitchell, smiling at the most famous example of those. “She didn’t come in that way.”

“Then we can’t know how she plans to leave,” Carter pointed out.

“Well, they checked all the old maintenance hatches. Still full of concrete. Harris is sending drones through the ventilation ducts, though if she can fit through those, she is _definitely_ an alien.”

“What about the main shaft?”

“Sealed shut. Down here and up there.” He pointed up. “Walter grabbed a couple satellites and made them take photos, and Landry’s tasked a couple guys on the surface to go hike up there.”

Carter rubbed her forehead. “They can’t have beaming technology. If they did, _none_ of this would make sense.”

Mitchell spread his hands in a shrug. “We’ll figure it out.”

* * *

“It was a sarcophagus, alright?” said Sanyal. “That’s what he called it. He said it could cure _anything._ My sister—she has cancer. It’s not operable, it’s too far spread, it hasn’t responded to any of the treatments. She’s dying. Do you know what it’s like to have somebody you love wasting away and dying and there’s nothing you can do? Every day, she gets weaker. Her arms are like sticks! Like freaking twigs! But of course you don’t care—you’re all military people, serving your great nation—sacrifices must be made—”

* * *

“He is a citizen of India,” insisted Smithe-Patel. “Any crime he has committed is against India. You _will_ have to release him to our custody sooner or later, General.”

“Your custody?” Landry gave her a slow look up and down. “You’re not cleared of suspicion, yourself, Ms. Smithe-Patel. _You_ were the one who insisted on his presence here.”

“He has been a good assistant,” she said, through gritted teeth. “I do not know why he would do this. You must let me speak to him.”

“What I _must_ do is secure this base,” Landry said firmly. “After all. We wouldn’t want another security breach.”

* * *

Eliot woke up slowly. Painfully. There was light. He was... in a hospital bed? With both wrists handcuffed to the sides.

The SGC’s infirmary.

“Mr. Spencer? Can you open your eyes?”

Nothing to be gained by playing dead. Eliot cracked his eyelids open, and immediately regretted it as the light increased. He held back the groan behind his teeth. Nothing to be gained from showing it hurt, either. The woman in front of him, he recognized only from Hardison’s profiles—Dr. Miranda Hersh. She’d been a ‘maybe’—there’d been indications she was doing work for the SGC but they hadn’t been certain it wasn’t just for NORAD.

“Follow my finger, please,” said the doc. He obeyed. “Good. Any nausea? Dizziness?”

Hard to be dizzy lying back like this, even with a concussion. He shook his head. Oh. _There_ was the dizziness.

“Uh-huh,” the doctor said dryly. “Do you know what day it is?”

* * *

“Dujardin,” said Mitchell, managing to refrain from rubbing his forehead. There was an edge of real hysteria to all of Sanyel’s words, but Mitchell couldn’t take him at face value. If he was lying, though, the guy deserved a punch in the mouth. “How’d he contact you?”

“The phone. He said, he explained all this. I thought he was insane. But he had... he explained certain events. Astronomical phenomena that had been covered up. Antarctica. Area 52... it all made more and more sense. And what did I have to lose? Priya was dying. So he said, go, get yourself onto this woman’s staff, plant yourself into this meeting. He said, we needed to get into this complex, we could find a sarcophagus there.”

“How were you planning on getting the sarcophagus out?”

Sanyal shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t! That wasn’t my part. I was just supposed to help find it. Once out—he would let my sister use it. Then it was his. But that would be enough.”

“So if getting out wasn’t your thing... what was the virus for?”

“It was just—it was just supposed to be a precaution. We would get in, and out, and it was just a precaution. Lock the whole base down, nobody could move around except us, and nobody would get hurt by it.”

“You developed all that in only a few weeks?”

“I’m good at what I do. But I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to help my sister.”

Mitchell nodded, slowly. Then he leaned forward, and let the jaws of the trap show, just a bit. “How long did you say you were working for Smithe-Patel, again?”

Sanyal froze.

* * *

Teal’c was standing outside the room they’d moved Spencer to, staring at the door in a contemplative way. Mitchell stopped beside him, looking back and forth and tilting his head. Whatever Teal’c was thinking, viewing the world ten degrees off parallel didn’t help Mitchell divine it. Sometimes, you just had to ask. “Thoughts on our wayward mercenary friend?”

“When I stunned him, it was because I feared he was about to attempt to kill Bes, despite Bes having been subdued,” said Teal’c. “It was what I expected, given our prior acquaintance. I stunned him to prevent harm to the host.”

Mitchell grimaced. He’d read the P4Q-959 report. But Teal’c had actually been there.

“Yet when I consider it again, it does not entirely fit. He reached toward Bes’s throat, but it was like this.” Teal’c held out his hand to demonstrate: the smaller two fingers were curled in. “It is counterproductive to use such a grip to strangle or break a neck, and according to Dr. Hersh, his fingers on that hand were not broken.”

Mitchell blinked. “He was... checking for a pulse?”

“Indeed. Despite my having just assured him that Bes was alive.” Teal’c folded his arms across his chest as he returned to his contemplation of the door.

“Huh.” Mitchell thought about that, then handed over the file in his hands. “Okay, so he knows Bes’s a goa’uld... he was _working_ with Bes... but then they fight. The ‘gate’s open, their exit’s right there, but instead Bes pauses and tries his level best to kill him.”

“And yet Eliot Spencer remained concerned for Bes’s life.” Teal’c flipped through the folder—printouts from the combined searches through FBI, CIA, NID, Interpol, and various other international databases. He got quickly to the end and raised an eyebrow. “This file seems remarkably light for a man of his... occupation.”

“Yeah, we figure the hacker cleaned up his trail. Landry’s working on it.” Mitchell shook his head. “Sanyal’s lying his ass off, but I’m pretty sure he was genuinely concerned about Dujardin. The host, not the goa’uld. Freaked out more when I made it sound like Spencer was at deaths’ door, too.” He stared at the door. They’d pulled the same earpiece off of Spencer as they’d found Bes wearing—and the hacker, Sanyal. Smithe-Patel hadn’t had one, despite Landry’s suspicions, unless she’d gotten rid of it, but she hadn’t seemed concerned for Spencer, either. Carter hadn’t noticed if Laughlin had one—they were pretty high-tech, nearly invisible—but she’d theorized it would explain why the fake doctor had seemed so spacey.

The earpieces were conclusive evidence that they were all working together. But if Sanyal’s sister really had cancer, Mitchell would eat his hat.

“I wasn’t sure there was a point to trying with Spencer. Guy like this, he’s not going to break under interrogation.” They had to try anyway, of course. “But if we have something he _wants_...”

“Eliot Spencer will not be motivated by concern for his allies.”

“But he _does_ want the goa’uld alive. Or the host.” Mitchell folded his arms and tapped his fingers against his elbow. “The question is, which?”

And why?

* * *

#### Three weeks ago:

After hiking up the mountain carrying all that stuff, walking the last bit to the peak in just shorts, t-shirt, and hat made Parker feel as light as a feather. If she also felt a bit in danger of floating off the mountain, well... it was exciting! That was all!

Beside her, Eliot kept hovering, and making her sip more water every two minutes. But she hadn’t thrown up at all, and even though the sun was really bright it was _really_ not as bad as it had been, and anyway—it didn’t matter if she was sick, it didn’t. She wasn’t going to miss this.

The military had made a nominal effort at disguising the entrance to the giant shaft at the top of the mountain. It looked more like a helicopter pad, almost—thirty feet across, painted the same white-grey as the rock around it. Whatever motors were used to move it, they must have been installed on the underside, because the only thing on the top were a pair of very obvious cameras and a couple of less-obvious motion-sensors.

“ _Smile for the cameras,”_ said Hardison, and Parker could hear his own smile in his voice. It shaded into concern. _“How you doing, babe?”_

“I’m fine,” she said, irritated. It was a bit embarrassing.

Eliot growled, “Drink some more water,” and she did, scowling. It _was_ embarrassing. Not that she _minded_ Eliot carrying all the rope and tackle, but... she didn’t like it, that he thought she might be weak enough that she _needed_ him to carry it.

 _It’s Eliot. They’re your team,_ she reminded herself, but it was still embarrassing.

“ _Alright. Electrification’s disabled... cracking the door now.”_

It was surprisingly quiet, for a giant metal door. A long, dark crack appeared down the middle, and the two sides rolled back, retreating into the rock around them—the entire setup must be _sixty_ feet across, she realized belatedly. Hardison didn’t open it all the way, just two feet. Parker knelt down at the edge and peered into the darkness. It was impossible to see anything, so she went down on her belly and stuck her whole head over the edge. Eliot grabbed the back of her shirt in a firm grip.

She still couldn’t see anything. Either they had the lights off downstairs, or the shaft was sealed on the other end, too. “Laser,” she said, holding out a hand. Eliot had all the gear.

Laser in hand, she wriggled forward—Eliot’s grip tightened—and stuck one arm down, clicking several times to get readings. They’d feed directly back to Hardison. “What’s it look like?”

“ _That’s only... five hundred twelve yards down,”_ said Hardison. _“They got another door.”_

“Or they sealed it up,” said Eliot.

“ _Maybe. Hey, you got Daisy with you?”_

“Daisy?”

“She’s our drone,” said Parker, still with her head in the shaft. Her eyes had adjusted enough that she thought she could see the walls, now, but it still went way too far down.

“You named the—whatever, yeah, I got it.” He was moving around a lot, jostling her as he got it out of the bag. He could just let _go_ , she thought, annoyed. It wasn’t like she was going to fall. _“_ And why couldn’t you have just flown it up the mountain?”

“ _With that rig on her, the battery life is a bit of a trade-off. Here, take her out and let her go.”_

“It’s not a girl, Hardison, it’s a flying... drone... insect thing.”

“Hey. Daisy was my birthday present,” said Parker, hauling herself out enough that she could frown at Eliot. “Because a dog wouldn’t be able to rappel with me.”

“Your—she—” Eliot looked like he was trying to say something. Parker waited expectantly, but he didn’t keep going, just made one of his frustrated faces as Daisy’s rotors whirred to life and she lifted over their heads, then glided elegantly into the dark crack into the mountain.

Parker wasn’t jealous. She wasn’t. She’d get to follow soon enough. She could be patient.

“ _Okay,”_ said Hardison. _“So there’s this door. Wires running up, they gotta be able to open this from the surface. ...And, accessing.”_

“What do you see?” asked Parker, whispering it down into the dark.

“ _More dark. Another door, four-thirty yards below this one. Same outside access... I’m gonna crack it.”_

“Someone might hear you,” said Eliot.

“ _Better we find that out now, right?”_

“It’s too short,” said Parker. “The main shaft still has another hundred yards.”

“ _Well, there you go. And... okay, we got daylight. Uh, fluorescent light. Yeah, ninety yards on the shaft, then... wow.”_

“Wow?”

“ _That is an alien wormhole-making device,”_ said Hardison.

“Ohhh, I wanna see it.”

“You’ll get your chance,” said Eliot. “Wait—you didn’t fly it down into the room, did you?!”

“ _Naw, just... looking down from above. But... wow, man.”_ Hardison’s voice was quiet. _“That is... that’s an alien wormhole device. That goes to other planets.”_

“Yeah,” said Eliot, also weirdly subdued.

Parker looked up and back at him. “It’s an alien thing at the bottom of a thousand foot shaft straight down!” She grinned. “Does it have vibration sensors?”

“Can’t, the ‘gate would set them off,” said Eliot. When she looked at him with curiosity, he shrugged. “It shakes.”

“ _They’ve got motion sensors,”_ said Hardison, and she could hear him grinning again. _“But they ain’t seeing much from them any more.”_

“Okay. Eliot, harness time.”

“ _Hey, now—”_

“You’re still all... pale, and shaky—”

“It’s not climbing up a mountain,” she said impatiently. When that didn’t get through, she tried, “I’ll be in the shade! You’ll be able to pull me up. Come on, I once did a job with a hundred-and-four degree fever, I nearly mixed up the diamond with the magnifying glass but I didn’t tangle my ropes.”

“Yeah, but...”

“If we don’t do this now, we’ll have to take all the rope back down the mountain. I’m _not_ leaving it up here in the elements.” The rope was really carbon-fibre line, and it was a lot more resistant than your average rope, but it still wasn’t good to leave it out in the open like that.

“I can do that.”

“We’ll have to make an extra trip up here to bring it back.”

Eliot grimaced, but didn’t look persuaded. They’d be coming back anyway—the lines for the sarcophagus were a lot heavier than what they’d carried up today, and cable that thick didn’t come in thousand-yard increments. But today’s line was long and strong enough to let her install the belay points that they would need—one pair every three hundred yards, each on opposite sides of the shaft so that they could keep the sarcophagus balanced safely in the centre.

They needed to let her _do her job_. She’d come all this way, there was no way she wasn’t jumping down that shaft. “Nate, tell them.”

Eliot blinked at her. What, had he thought Nate wasn’t listening? True, it was usually very obvious when Nate was listening, because he was a control freak and tended to micromanage, but he’d been busy being quiet and creepy for the last two weeks. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still _listening_ , because again, control freak.

“ _Parker’s the expert,”_ said Nate. _“Listen to her.”_

She beamed at Eliot. “See? There you go. Hey, we’ll set up a nice little nest at the lower point, drill a couple extra holes to tie stuff to, we can stash drinks and food down there, it’ll be great, like hanging out in the living room, only _actually_ hanging, it’ll be so much more comfortable...”

* * *

#### Four hours ago:

Ten feet below Parker, the lowest shaft door began opening. Her eyes widened as she looked around her rig. No, that hadn’t been anything she’d done. Somebody was opening it from below her—it couldn’t be from above her, she’d redirected all those calls! She peered at the comm setup, but there was no time to try and doublecheck everything—if they were opening the door, then somebody was going to look through it very shortly.

She’d pulled up all the ropes below her, but she couldn’t get _up_ faster than Daisy could fly. If they had a drone, she was screwed. And they had to have a drone. Normal people never went up or down their giant vertical shafts in person if they could help it. (Normal people were weird.)

The gap in the door was a foot wide. She needed to move. She needed—

Her eyes seized on the sack of gear hanging to her right. Eliot had insisted on stashing the camo gear in the shaft instead of carrying it back down the mountain—which shouldn’t have been a problem except he’d still been all spooky-careful with her that day and wouldn’t let her carry anything except her water-bottle on the way back. They’d stuffed it in a sack, and lowered it with the rest of the equipment to the little hanging command centre they’d set up down here.

Her fingers flew through the knots. She could hear voices drifting up from below, bouncing back and forth across the stone. It made it impossible to understand what they were saying but she could picture it anyway, _“We’re setting the drone up now,”_ and _“Soon we’ll have her!”_ and all the other things security guards loved to say, but—no, no, no.

Parker wrapped the camo tarp around herself fully, the way that Hardison had told her would make her cook, and started counting.

* * *

“You can see the spikes in temperature and CO2 here,” said Walter, pointing at squiggly lines on the graph. “It doesn’t look like a high spike in CO2, but for that much to be in the shaft, somebody must have been in there for several hours at least.”

“But not anymore,” Landry said grimly.

“No, sir. We did pick up a heat signature, lower down here, and we took some pictures—” He put them on the desk. They showed a concrete wall, with several black bags hanging from hooks drilled into the wall, and an opaque tarp covering something else—more equipment, probably. Another picture was in infrared, and it took Landry’s brain a moment to process it and recognize it as the same scene. “It’s only residual heat, but it means that either there was equipment running here, or a person.”

“Any idea how long ago?”

“Five minutes before we took these, maybe. But we sent that drone the whole way up the shaft—they’re not there anymore, sir. They must have rabbited as soon as we cracked the door open. They’ll be on top of the mountain by now.”

“Hold that thought,” said Landry, and picked up his phone, punching in the number of the upstairs boys. He barked orders into the phone—there was a trespasser on the mountain, they were to be apprehended _immediately—_ and hung up again.

“Unless they’ve got a helicopter, they’re not getting out ahead of that,” he said, and snorted. And trying to fly a helicopter into Cheyenne Mountain airspace—well, if Laughlin and whoever was left was that dumb, Landry would count his blessings.

He looked back down at the photos. “Hmm. These are... cables reels, here...”

“Yes, sir. We found several more installed at regular intervals. Whatever they wanted to lift out, it was a lot heavier than a person.”

“The Stargate?”

Walter shook his head quickly. “No, sir. Or, they wouldn’t have managed it if they had tried, at least. Those cables are way too small.”

Landry frowned down at it. “They can’t _really_ have been trying to steal a sarcophagus.” The SGC didn’t even _have_ a sarcophagus!

* * *

#### Three and a half hours ago:

Parker yanked the tarp off her head. She looked up. She looked down. The door was still open, two feet wide. She couldn’t see the drone, but it was really, really dark.

She pulled the rest of the tarp off and tried not to pant too much in the wonderfully, blissfully cool air.

* * *

“Eliot Spencer. Born June 27, 1975. Enlisted age eighteen, tours in Iraq, Somalia, Kuwait, Bosnia... decorated several times for combat, quickly started racking up a hell of a list of classified actions... signed with Blackwater instead of re-upping in ‘97. Recruited for the SGC in ‘99, but you were out on your ass after two months.” Mitchell tipped his head to the side. “And yet somehow, here you are. Care to explain why?”

The man sitting on the other side looked back at him silently. He had one hell of a black eye, broken nose, swollen lip, and according to Dr. Hersh’s report, two broken ribs and a knee that had needed resetting. Mitchell still wouldn’t have liked to go a round with him in hand-to-hand. On Teal’c’s advice, they’d cuffed both his hands to the chair, not just one.

“Your buddy—your hacker pal? He’s been singing like a canary. Not the most truthful canary, but,” Mitchell shrugged, “we’ll figure it out. Somebody talks long enough, the lies tangle up, but the truth repeats. Somebody like you—you know that. He seems a bit more ignorant.”

Oh, he had Spencer’s attention now. The other man didn’t say anything, didn’t shift in his chair, didn’t narrow his eyes. But Mitchell could feel the force of his gaze intensifying. Worried about what Sanyal would say?

“Somebody like you’d also know that helping a goa’uld infiltrate this facility is treason. And that carries the death penalty.”

That just got him a glimmer of amusement—but then, for the first time, words. “You got a judge and jury read in to the program now?”

“You wouldn’t be the first person to be tried for it since the program started. You wouldn’t be the first to die for it, either. No jury, but a judge, yep, and then a couple years on death row.” Mitchell sat back in his chair and looked at his watch. “Your goa’uld friend, on the other hand, will be dead in about an hour, so if you’ve got anything to say about him before he becomes irrelevant, now’d be the time.”

And the amusement was gone again, not vanished but slowly shuttered, Spencer’s reaction controlled even as the intensity of his gaze wasn’t. Teal’c was right—Spencer wanted the goa’uld alive. Or the host.

Mitchell kept eye-contact and made himself recall the report on P4Q-959. Let it keep his expression cold and hard. “If you know who the host was, we’d appreciate being able to close that off.”

A muscle jumped in Spencer’s jaw.

Aha. So it was the host.

Then Spencer leaned forward—slowly, carefully. He didn’t rattle the cuffs. “You know why I got kicked out of the SGC program?”

“You tell me.”

“There was a planet. Mir. Controlled by Uneg, one of Ra’s former underlings. It had strategic value. But General Hammond disagreed, afterward, on... acceptable methods.”

It hung there, in the silence, the things that Spencer wasn’t saying. The nightmare descriptions that had been consigned to a dusty file that had rarely been read by anyone in the eight years since. If Spencer was executed for treason, maybe that would be close enough to justice for Mir.

“Yeah,” said Spencer. “You read that file. It made you very angry, didn’t it? It still does.”

Yes, because unlike Spencer, Mitchell wasn’t a psychopath. But where was Spencer going with this?

Spencer relaxed back again, still moving slowly enough that the chain links didn’t jingle. The corner of his mouth quirked up, on the side where he wasn’t nursing a busted lip. “You didn’t kill the host. And you won’t.”

And... shit. Mitchell froze his own expression, locking it down. Yet—this was still useful. Spencer _really_ didn’t want Dujardin—whoever he actually was—dead.

“That’s an odd thing for a man like you to care about, Spencer.”

Spencer blinked at him, slowly. Gave another little lop-sided smile.

And didn’t say another word.


	5. Chapter 5

#### Two hours ago:

“Sir.” Carter ducked into Landry’s office, breathless in that way that meant she’d either found a massive problem or a very-much-needed solution. Since she was holding a laptop, Landry sent up a quick prayer that it was the latter. Especially since the boys up above _still_ hadn’t managed to run their intruder to ground on the mountain’s surface. “They tapped the trunkline.”

Landry raised his eyebrows. “Which trunkline are you talking about?”

“The data trunkline into the mountain. See, Colonel Mitchell mentioned, when the IOA reps are vetted, it’s not just electronic profiles. We talk to them—you talk to them, sir, and their governments. But all of that, all phonecalls, emails, internet, any information that goes in and out of the mountain, it goes through the trunkline. If someone can tap into that, they can control it—they can redirect it. So I set up a pulse-modulating waveform ping, and ran it through a series of—”

Landry held up a hand. “As much as I appreciate the work you do, Colonel, just tell me the results.”

“Somebody installed a shunt just before the first relay, here.” Carter put the laptop down and turned it to face Landry. It showed a satellite photo looking down on the mountain, and she tapped a point near the southern ridge, then circled it with her fingers. “Somewhere in these hundred meters or so of line.”

“So they can listen in on all our phonecalls?”

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that, sir. Depending on the setup, they could be controlling all of them. From here it would look like the call is going out to India, or Russia, or France, but in reality it’s going somewhere completely different, and they’re the ones picking up on the other end. Unless you know the person you’re talking to, there’s no way to be sure that they’re really who you’re talking to... and even then, they could be using voice modulators.”

Landry stared at the phones on his desk. He’d talked to two-dozen people in the last three hours. Most of them had been _very unhelpful._ “Can you fix it?”

“Not from down here, sir.”

“Then you need out of lockdown.”

“I’m afraid so, sir. If we ask the surface teams to take a look...”

“...we might not actually be talking to them. Alright.” Landry stood up. “Then let’s get you to the surface. And while you’re up there, you can make some phonecalls.”

* * *

The comms unit had too many outgoing signals. Parker was frantically hitting hold for each—she couldn’t route this many to Tara! Even Tara couldn’t do a dozen people at _literally_ the same time! Even _Sophie_ couldn’t!—when all at once they cut off, and then they all went on again. Parker’s eyes widened with deep dismay. Off and on, off and on, and—there couldn’t be this many people making calls, but the lights kept blinking at her with imperious agitation, until she hit the power switch on the side of the unit and it went entirely dark.

“Tara,” she whispered. “They figured it out. They know we’re tapped into their phones.”

There was a pause. _“Well, that took longer than I expected. Parker, you should get out of there.”_

“I can’t. The others are all here. I can’t leave them.”

“ _You don’t have to_ leave _them, leave them. Look, NORAD doesn’t have prison facilities. At some point they’re gonna get transferred. I’ll help you find some retrieval experts, put together a team, we’ll figure out when and where, and hit them in transit.”_

“No! No, you don’t understand, it’s not—I kinda lied. A bit. It’s not NORAD.”

“ _You—wait, you lied? You managed to lie to me?”_

“Only kinda? It’s under NORAD. It’s the SGC, it’s—”

“ _Oh, shit.”_

“You know about them?”

“ _I know they’re a black hole.”_

“Yeah! Maybe literally! They’ll dump everybody on some alien planet—a prison planet! And then we’ll have to steal a spaceship! And I don’t know how to drive a spaceship, I don’t think it’s like boosting a car, it’s like a plane, except it’s in vacuum, and what if something happens, and all the air gets sucked out—”

“ _Parker—Parker, breathe, that’s not gonna happen. They’re not gonna get sent to a—to another planet, Jesus. It just means they’re better than most agencies at burying their tracks. But—”_

“No! They are! They really do! They have wormholes and stuff! We had to wait until the spaceships were out of orbit so they couldn’t Star Trek us up and—”

“ _PARKER!”_

Parker shut her mouth and glared into the darkness, trying not to cry with frustration.

* * *

The first phonecall, as soon as Sam had a new phone, went to Jack.

“ _Sam,”_ he drawled. _“Been hearing some odd things. You know, I’ve been waiting all afternoon for Landry to call me back.”_

Which meant he’d been an inch away from declaring a foothold situation. Great. The first thing to do was de-escalate that. Shortly thereafter, she had command of a pair of helicopters and the engineering and assault teams to go with them: one team to figure out where the tap had gone in on the trunkline and remove it, and another to inspect and secure the top of the primary shaft—because, as it turned out, NORAD had _not_ been the ones to pick up that phonecall.

It was impossible to make calls over the noise of the rotors, but as soon as they landed and she’d told the team where to start searching, she was on again. Hopefully, the satellite network wasn’t compromised. ...Who was she kidding, of course it was. Sanyal’s crew had managed to hack the SGC’s hardline, bypassing every camera on the ground or in the air to do so. They’d have needed to get into the satellites just for that—from there, why _wouldn’t_ they have breached the communications systems? Damnit, she was going to have to spend so much time checking everything. All their codes were going to need to be changed. Jack had promised to put some of the teams at Area 52 on it, including tracking down whoever was at the other end of that tap, but she was still going to have to review a lot of it herself.

Sanyal had done a thorough job with the databases, too; calls through official channels to the FBI, NID, and CIA quickly confirmed that, and also that those agencies really had been receiving Landry’s calls earlier. Apparently Sanyal was good enough that his co-conspirators felt comfortable letting those ones through. But information had a habit of persisting, in Sam’s experience, if you looked for it from enough angles. Sam switched tactics and started calling up personal contacts. An ex-boyfriend, who put her in touch with a friend in the FBI—a contact in the NID who had shown a strange sort of honour, for a slimebag—a friend of Mitchell’s, who’d been in the CIA. And a call to one of Jack’s Interpol contacts.

The FBI responded immediately, sending over the same files that they’d already sent, and basic profiles of all the IOA personnel that matched their IOA dossiers. They didn’t seem to be taking the possibility of a data breach particularly seriously. Sam sent a text to Jack, because it wasn’t technically in the SGC’s jurisdiction but it was unprofessionally sloppy and they deserved having whatever weight a two-star general could get dumped on their heads. The NID _was_ taking it seriously, and was therefore both suspicious of her and uncooperative, but Lindon said he’d tell her if they found anything and she mostly believed him. The CIA was the same, except with more oblique phrasing, and she didn’t believe them at all.

Interpol called her back fifteen minutes later and asked, “Can you hold for transfer, ma’am?”

* * *

Far overhead, the upper doors were opening. Parker stared upward at the slowly growing—still very tiny—dot of daylight, now edging into twilight, nearly a thousand yards above. That... that wasn’t good. She grabbed the binoculars and zoomed in. Machinery was being positioned in the opening, and occasionally somebody’s head would appear. She recognized how they were setting things up. They were going to run down cables.

The drone had seen her equipment, even if it hadn’t seen her. They were coming to grab it.

Parker cursed under her breath as the door just beneath her began to move again, the gap widening. Yep, they were sending someone down. Or they were going to haul someone up. If they sent cables down first, she could climb on, and—and then what? She couldn’t go out the top, there were people up there. There was nowhere to hide in the shaft itself if they took all her stuff away. Could she go down?

As the doors finished retracting, she poked her head out just a bit, looking down below, sticking as close to the wall as she could to minimize her profile. There were a pair of people on the ground—or, rather, the platform; with the stargate right below the shaft, it was mostly platform directly beneath it—looking back up. She didn’t think they saw her. Yet.

There were people at either end. She was stuck like a rat in a tube.

She was going to get caught and then nobody would be able to save the team.

A sudden shout echoed hollowly up to her. She peeked downward again. The two people on the platform were gone, but there was more shouting... why? She glanced upward, checking with the binocs. No change there. Except, no, wait, one of the doors—the middle door—it was closing. They were closing it. Why?

She looked down again just in time to see an enormous blue light _swoosh_ outward from the stargate. It gleamed, like cloth made of lightning, or a wave of water filled with glittering sapphires, and she was caught by it, fascinated. And then terrified. That was a wormhole. They’d opened a wormhole. They might be sending all her friends away _right now_.

She had to get down there.

Before she had time to grab anything, though, people started running _out_ of the stargate. From above, staring down at the top of it, that really was what it looked like: one of those circus illusions, with all the clowns escaping from the tiny car. She couldn’t see the portal to the other world, but first two, then one more, then another three people rushed out—the first pair holding on to each other, and in the last set two were dragging the third. There was lots more shouting, and now she could hear cries for medics, and—she peered through the binocs. Was that _arrows_ sticking out of the one guy? ...And that other guy’s arm?

The two still near the stargate, dragging their buddy, abruptly hit the decking. She’d thought they’d tripped, but... no, those were arrows going over their heads, like darts.

Probably not where they were going to send her team, if they were running away from it.

But she still had to get down there. They were distracted, as distracted as they were likely to get—this was her last chance. She turned back to the bag and dug frantically. Hardison always overpacked. _Nate—_ Real Nate, not Not-Nate, he always overpacked and overplanned too, but it hadn’t been _Real_ Nate so it must have been Hardison and she loved him so, so much as she came up with a brown wig. It went on over her hair. She wriggled into a set of coverall BDUs, pulling them on overtop of her whole harness, leaving the front unzipped so she wouldn’t tangle up her line. A couple more odds and ends went in the BDU pockets.

Then she hit the fast drop, and went down, down, _down._ She burst into open air and was past it in a moment—there was a room filled with people, many shouting, two on gurneys, more gurneys being brought in—and then she was behind the stargate. It was suddenly solid in the middle now, a metal sheet pulled across it and covering her from view. She hit the brake. It was just within acceptable parameters of force to not break her neck, but her boots still clanged loudly on the grating as she landed.

She held her breath, but everyone else in the room was making a _lot_ more noise.

Detach rope, hit winch. It flew upward. She zipped up her coveralls and checked the wig. It was probably too long for a soldier. She tried tying it back. That made it a less effective disguise, but at least it was still brown. She’d just have to make sure she didn’t run into Carter or that other doctor.

All the rest of her gear hung a hundred yards above her, abandoned. She dismissed it. She was back in the base. She’d _chosen_ this.

Parker took a deep breath, and then dropped from the platform, ran around the side of the ‘gate, and joined the frantic tangle of people all trying to get the injured people out of the room.

* * *

#### Twenty minutes ago:

“—not saying it was your fault,” said Jackson.

“No, you were just saying that if I hadn’t been there, right then, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Vala. “But, really, I think anyone with _taste_ would have had a problem—”

“You were just supposed to sip! Sip it! Not gulp it and then spray it out onto the fire!”

“I have been to a thousand banquets on a thousand different planets, Daniel, and on _none_ of them would _that_ be considered fit to drink. I don’t even think it was alcoholic—”

“Doctor Jackson,” Landry said wearily. “Vala.”

They straightened up as he entered the room, trailed by Mitchell and Teal’c. Jackson looked unscathed, but Vala had a large bruise developing—half of her face would be purple by morning, if it looked that bad now. “You’ve gotten that checked out?” Mitchell asked.

“What, this?” Vala wriggled a finger at her cheek. “Don’t worry, we’ve been through medical already.”

“Really, don’t worry,” said Jackson, _sotto-voice_. “It’s a winestain.”

Ah.

“The infirmary looked pretty busy,” Jackson added, frowning. “Hersh tossed us out as soon as we were through the MRI. Did something happen?”

“You could say that. The debriefing from P2N-983 can wait. Carter should be here any—ah. Colonel.”

“Sir,” said Carter, stepping into the room. She had a stack of folders with her, that she dumped onto the desk and started handing out, only pausing to do a double-take at Vala’s face.

“Winestain,” Mitchell said helpfully.

“Interpol came through,” said Carter. “They keep offline records of all our thieves.”

“Thieves?” Landry and Vala asked at the same time, in very different tones. Vala sat forward, eyes sparkling with excitement, and grabbed one of the files for herself to flip through.

“Professional, world-class thieves,” said Carter, sounding tired. “Run by a goa’uld. They were posing as IOA.”

Vala grinned. “See, this is what happens when you send us offworld for these things!”

Everyone else around the table chose not to comment on that.

Mitchell had opened the top folder; a mugshot of Dujardin stared up at him—real name, Nathan Ford. American, California-born, divorced, had done time in supermax... for only six months? Which didn’t match the sentence listed right beside it. A goa’uld would have had plenty of options for getting out of prison, but then, why would goa’uld have sat there for six months first? Mitchell frowned, and checked through the rest. There were four others, accounting for Sanyal, Smithe-Patel—well, she was in the shit now—Eliot Spencer, and a blond woman that matched Laughlin’s description.

He looked at Carter. “The other IOA reps came back clean?”

“As far as Interpol is concerned, yes.”

Ugh. That meant they’d have to deal with Vlasov again in future. It seemed highly unlikely his attitude toward them would have been improved any by this little episode.

Teal’c had flipped through to Spencer’s file and was leafing through it. “This mentions warrants being dropped for services rendered.”

“Yeah,” said Carter. “That’s the funny bit. Their targets are always criminals. Usually corporations, shady businessmen, but they’ve also dismantled a couple different mobs, several international armsrunning organizations... Interpol quietly cleared most of their outstanding warrants, officially for that, but based on some of the hints the agent dropped, it was actually...” She reached over and flipped to the back of Ford’s file, then located a photo and tugged it free. “For this.”

Mitchell squinted at it. “That’s a nuclear processing facility.” He considered. “Was a nuclear processing facility.” He turned it ninety degrees and checked the stamp on it. “Kazhistan, huh. That’s a job for a strike force, not a thief.”

Carter flicked a finger at the photos. “They sabotaged the calibration weight for the centrifuges.”

“Ah.”

General Landry was staring down at the files he had open with an expression halfway between thunderous and incredulous. “So we were broken into by a bunch of wanna-be Robin Hoods? They’re led by a goa’uld!”

“They might not have known that, sir,” Mitchell temporized. “Sanyal—uh, Alec Hardison?—has been consistent in claiming he didn’t know.”

“He wouldn’t even tell us his real name.”

“He’s lying about almost everything else,” Mitchell agreed. “But that, he’s been consistent in. The other two have both expressed concern for the host, too.”

“He did help us disable the lockdown faster than I could have done it on my own, sir.”

“What’s a ‘Robin Hood’?” asked Vala.

“It’s an English legend. A thief who steals from the rich and gives it away to the poor,” Jackson explained.

Vala wrinkled her nose. “That sounds more like a myth than a legend. Gives it away, really? That’s not a thief. That’s _definitely_ not a goa’uld.”

“And it is not Eliot Spencer, either,” said Teal’c.

“No,” said Mitchell. He looked down at Dujardin—Ford’s—file again, and grimaced. “No, it is not.”


	6. Chapter 6

Landry set the file down on the table, turned it around, and pushed it toward Smithe-Patel—aka Sophie Devereaux, aka Katherine Clive, aka Charlotte Prentiss, aka Annie Kroy, etc, etc, Real Name Unknown. Smithe-Patel was as good a name for her as any. She took in the file with a slight widening of the eyes, and a certain air of resignation.

“I suppose this explains the handcuffs,” she said, raising one elegant wrist—and speaking with an entirely different accent; this one purely English, refined enough to leave one bleeding. The file had warned about that, but it was still disconcerting to hear.

“I suppose it explains why you’re so concerned about security breaches,” Landry retorted.

She smiled, just a little. “It’s a living.”

“Uh-huh. Now, Ms. Smithe-Patel—or whichever name you want—I can tell you’re a sophisticated, complicated lady. But I’m afraid I’m a very simple man, so we’re going to have to work on my level, here. You’re going to tell us exactly how you got past our security and what you did while inside, and in return, you might not spend the _entire_ remainder of your natural life in a cell.”

She looked back at him silently, her dark eyes revealing nothing.

Landry gave it a minute, then shrugged, stood, and reached for the file.

“Six years ago, my best friend’s son died.”

He paused, looking down at her. She met his gaze steadily, looking back through dark lashes.

“He was eight years old. It was a rare form of cancer. Both his parents carried the genetic predisposition for it, and their little boy got unlucky. Conventional treatments didn’t work, and the family couldn’t afford the experimental one. I could have covered it. I could have written them a cheque, but I wasn’t in the country. I didn’t hear about it until a week after the funeral.”

It was a ploy. It was obviously just a ploy.

Landry found himself listening anyway.

“Six weeks ago, my best friend told me this crazy story. About a technology that the US military had, that could cure... anything. Almost anything. It could save millions of lives, millions of untreatable cases. Children like his son, who are dying now, for whom there’s no hope... it could save them. And the military, he said, was sitting on it. Keeping it a secret of the state.

“Would you have told him no, General? Your best friend? ‘It’s too late, move on. You couldn’t save your son, you can’t save these other children either. It’s just the way the world works.’”

“Your ‘best friend’ is a psychotic alien warlord.”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right, and when we found that out we helped you stop him. But before that, we only had what we were allowed to know.”

Landry’s lips thinned. “You’re an intelligent woman, Ms. Smithe-Patel. You knew you’d be breaking into a top-secret, ultra-secure facility, to try and steal alien technology. You expect me to believe you never considered how dangerous it might be?”

“My friend let doctors inject poison into his little boy’s veins, because it had a chance of curing him. Chemotherapy destroys the body’s immune system, vital organs, can permanently damage the nervous system and the brain. But the most dangerous thing, about all those deadly treatments... is that so often, they don’t work. And you’re left with another bereaved family. Another dead child.”

It might not have been her child, but the look on her face said she’d grieved for that child personally all the same. If it wasn’t just an act—and she was a professional con artist, so it probably was. God help him, he was glad General O’Neill wasn’t here.

He slapped the file folder closed and picked it up, glaring at her. “I’m not talking about the sarcophagus. I’m talking about the danger posed to Earth, danger made greater by your actions. The SGC is responsible for keeping all of Earth safe, and you jeopardized that. We’re fighting a war, here. You want extra R&D poured into medical? That takes money. Funding. And it sure doesn’t help us get that funding when you come in here and turn the damn base upside-down just to kick the anthill!”

“Of course,” said Smithe-Patel. She traced a circle on the tabletop with one finger, her gaze following the motion. “So you’d have told him no.” Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “Would you have told your daughter no?”

How had she—

Professional con artist with access to a world-class hacker. Of course she would know everything about the officers she was trying to fool. It didn't mean anything. It didn't... He had definitely lost control of this conversation.

Landry turned and left.

* * *

Mitchell tossed the file down on the table, letting the pages fan out. It was a carefully selected few—photographs, mostly, of Spencer’s team. The Interpol files, which had nearly as much speculation as confirmed facts, had been light on photos, but there were enough.

Spencer looked slowly down at them, then back up at Mitchell. His blank expression didn’t change.

“So, I’ve got a problem,” said Mitchell, sitting down and settling back in the chair. “See, Interpol would like me to believe that your team is, if not always on the straight-and-narrow, then at least not a bunch of psychopathic monsters. But then there’s the fact that they hang around with you.”

Spencer didn’t say anything right away. Of course, he wouldn’t. Everything this guy did was controlled. It was what made him more horrifying, not less: here was somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and very deliberately chose to do it anyway.

“The worst thing I ever did in my life,” said Spencer, “I did a year after Mir.”

Jesus. Something worse than Mir would have to be enough for a death sentence all on its own.

“I was working for a man known as Damien Moreau. It was on his orders. A year after that, I... quit. We went our separate ways. I wasn’t gonna stop him. But I wasn’t gonna do that anymore, either.”

His gaze flicked down to the file. The full Interpol file had mentioned Damien Moreau—international gunrunner, smuggler, slaver. It was sketchy on the details of what, exactly, Eliot Spencer’s team of thieves had done to take him down, but certainly provided them credit. Reading between the lines, it linked directly to Nathan Ford’s vanishing supermax sentence. Interpol wasn’t taking credit for it, but there’d been an agency sponsor in there somewhere.

“Last year, we took down Moreau. CIA had tried assassinating Moreau seven times. Interpol tried twice. That was just in the years I worked for him. But Nate... Moreau tried to have Nate murdered and Nate just dropped him into prison.”

Prison, for life, in a backwater little European country with no extradition treaties. Interpol had been very approving. Mitchell couldn’t say he disagreed, really.

“The jobs we do... we don’t kill people. We help people. Six years ago, I’d have shot you sooner than believe you if you’d told me that was a thing that... that _I_ could do.”

“You’re telling me you turned over a new leaf.”

“There’s nothing I can do that could wash away what I’ve done. I’ve always known that. So I can’t deny I deserve to go down for whatever you’ve got on me.” Spencer’s gaze rested on the photographs. “But they don’t.”

* * *

“You’re Samantha Carter,” blurted Alec Hardison, as soon as Sam entered the room. His eyes had widened. “You wrote the firewall, didn’t you? Can I just say—it was such an honour to work with you, sort of, if you count that as working together, which I do, it was amazing. I am really very sorry about all of this, I did _not_ know Dujardin was a goa’uld, none of us did—er, except the goa’uld itself, of course, it must have known—”

Sam decided to let him wind down.

It took a while.

“—but for me personally, and I feel confident I speak for Mr. Spencer as well when I say that it was quite a shock, and we never would have helped it if we’d known. Though I don’t know what we’d have done instead, because then we’d have, uh, somebody running around with an evil brain worm in their head, and I’m not really sure I’m equipped to deal with that, but you’re _Samantha Carter_ , and presumably, even though that other fellow refused to say anything yes or no, you and your giant military space-faring program _can_ actually do something about removing the evil brain worms and not letting it eat somebody’s brain—”

Okay, that was enough winding down. Sam held up a hand. “He’s still in surgery, but the last update I saw from our CMO, she was confident that she would be able to entirely remove the, ah, ‘evil brain worm’ from Mr. Ford.”

“Oh! That’s good.” The penny-drop was visible. “That’s... good.”

She put the file down on the table in front of him, and took a seat. He reached for it with his uncuffed hand, paused long enough to look up for permission, and flipped it open. His own face stared up at him.

“Interpol got back to you, eh?”

“Yep,” said Sam, letting a bit of sympathy show.

“I bet it was Sterling.”

“Yep.”

“I really hate that guy.”

Sam nodded, still sympathetic, a little bit amused. Hardison was still keeping the accent up, even though it couldn’t be his natural one—his file said he was born and raised in North Carolina.

“Alec,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “You’re probably the best programmer I’ve ever encountered. That override program you wrote—it’s... well, it’s not a good _thing_ , but it is exceptionally well-designed. And I’ve been cleaning up the rest of your work all day—it’s elegant. Brilliant.”

“That means a lot, coming from you. It really does. Ma’am. Trying to get past your work was... uh... it was not easy.”

“I’d like to recruit you for the Stargate Program. You have a knack for working with alien programming that is vanishingly rare. And when you were informed you’d been tricked, you stepped up and worked under the clock and helped prevent an enemy of Earth escaping with a hostage. But you are sitting in a pile of shit, and you’ve been shovelling it higher and higher since. It’s time to stop. Playtime’s over. Earth needs you.” She nodded down at his file. “I need you to cut a deal.”

He stared at her. Then he looked down at the file, flipping through it. It was light on pictures; he wasn’t as oft-photographed as certain other members of his team.

“What about the others?” he asked.

* * *

The earpiece arrived stuck to the bottom of Sophie’s plastic water cup at dinner. It was old instinct that had her checking the bottom, swiping her fingers across it and pocketing what was there before she quite realized what she’d done. Surreptitiously transferring it to her ear, later, was child’s play, even (especially) with a camera to perform for; of course, that was the advantage of being a woman with long hair. Hardison might have had more difficulty.

“Hello?” she asked, barely loud enough for it to count as a sound. She wasn’t sure if the camera had sound, too, although the background HVAC was at least noisy enough to provide some cover.

“ _Sophie,”_ hissed Parker. _“Oh, thank god.”_

“They have Hardison’s computer, this isn’t secure.”

“ _No, no, this is just a two-way radio. Hardison showed me how to make one—sometimes I just want to talk to him,”_ she said, completely unselfconscious. Sophie would have smiled, if not for the camera. Parker could be very sweet.

Very sweet. Very loyal. Damn it, they were all past plan double-Z,she didn’t even know if Nate was still alive, would ever be _Nate_ again. She wasn’t sure she was getting anywhere with Landry. She’d save who she could. “Did you get in contact with Tara?”

“ _I did, we were running the lines for a while.”_ That explained why it had taken as long as it had for the curtain to come down, then... _“But they figured out the tap. She told me to get out.”_

“You should have,” Sophie said softly. Two-way radio. Parker had to still be inside the mountain.

“ _I can’t just leave you guys! What if they send you to some alien prison planet? I have to be here, or I can’t... I can’t... they have Nate in surgery. They’ve been there for_ hours _.”_

Still in surgery. Still alive, then. “They’re trying to get the alien out of his head.” 7 _0% success rate_ , she’d been told, before Interpol had delivered their files and it had gone even more to hell. Those weren’t bad odds, until suddenly one was talking about _brain surgery_. “Parker, listen to me, we’re not going to be taken off of Earth. They’ve already threatened me with Gitmo, actually, and they mentioned Leavenworth for the boys. It won’t be an alien planet. These people fight aliens, they hate them, they’re not going to trust them with their prisoners.”

“ _Oh.”_ Parker paused. _“You’re sure?”_

“Yes,” Sophie lied. “You have to get out of here. You can best help us from the outside—you know what Eliot says, transport is always the most vulnerable time. Put together a team... nab us then.”

It was a miracle she hadn’t been caught already.

“ _That’s what Tara said. ...She didn’t believe me about the alien planets.”_

“It is a bit out of most people’s experiences.”

“ _Yeah. I don’t know if I can leave, Sophie.”_

“I believe in you. You can get out of anywhere.”

“ _No, I mean, I don’t know if_ I _... can leave.”_

“I believe in you,” Sophie repeated.

There was silence, for a long time. She wondered if Parker had turned off her radio. It would undoubtedly be the wiser course of action; this couldn’t be very secure, not without Hardison’s wizardry to back it up. But then Parker spoke again. _“If you see Hardison before I do... tell him... tell him... I tried to get him a radio, but somebody was with him.”_

“I’ll tell him.”

“ _Keep the radio with you.”_

“I will.”

Silence, then, and this time it went unbroken.

* * *

De-snaking procedures, as they’d come to be called colloquially, were, bar none, the most challenging surgeries that Dr. Carolyn Lam had ever participated in. The danger to the patient was massive: they had an eighteen inch rope wrapped around their upper spinal cord, digging into their brainstem. Worse than that, microtendrils originating from symbiote’s mouth hooked deeply into the victim’s brain, having wriggled through gaps between and often shoved aside human brain tissue. It was no wonder that in the first few years of the program a successful live separation had never been achieved. The miraculous thing was that it was possible for a goa’uld to leave its host alive at all: the initial compression of tissue alone should have caused crippling brain-damage.

Once they’d gotten reliable access to Asgardian beaming technology, however, miracles had started to become possible. It took a twenty hour surgery with constant access to an MRI and a dedicated team of neurosurgeons, not to mention state-of-the-art alien-based technology, but it was possible. It still wasn’t without risk. Since it was always performed on an unwilling patient—or, rather, a hostage who wasn’t in control of their own actions—it couldn’t be performed while the patient was awake. It was insanely tricky brain surgery, and they couldn’t be certain they hadn’t reduced the patient to a vegetable until it was all over.

Which meant the moment of truth was... now.

“Mr. Ford? Mr. Ford, can you hear me?”

Her patient’s facial muscles twitched as he continued to come out of the deep anaesthesia. That was a scary risk all its own—keeping a goa’uld unconscious required enough anaesthetic to kill a normal human, and the switch between that and when the symbiote finally stopped filtering for its host happened very late and could be very sharp.

“Mr. Ford, can you open your eyes?”

Slowly, he did. Groggy, confused, but his gaze focused on her face after a second, which was excellent.

“Can you follow my finger, please? Good. I’m going to hold up a straw to your mouth, it’s got water if you’d like to take a sip—please don’t try to sit forward just yet. Thank you. Can you tell me your full name?”

“Nathan Ford,” he rasped.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“It’s... I...” He licked his lips. His eyes darted nervously over her face, then over her shoulder, at her assistant, around the room. “It doesn’t make much sense.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement; she glanced down and saw that he was touching fingers-to-thumb on his right hand, alternating rapid-fire. Testing his ability to move his own limbs.

“The goa’uld’s gone, Mr. Ford. We got it out of your head. We know about it. We’re not going to think you’re crazy.”

“It’s a... brain tumour,” he said, testingly.

“I’m afraid not. It’s an alien parasite and it really was controlling you. But it’s gone, and you’re safe. I promise.”

He closed his eyes, clearly struggling with the lingering effects of the anaesthetic for self-control. Then he opened them again and brought both his hands up. He tested one hand, then the other, watching carefully. Oh, boy. This one was definitely going to need therapy.

Carolyn was going to have to figure out how to get him it. This was the first time they’d successfully de-snaked a previously unaware civilian. Their previous operations had always been on personnel already involved in the Stargate program, or persons from other planets entirely.

“We are certain the goa’uld is entirely gone,” she said firmly. “It was major surgery, so I do need to run you through a neurological exam. Please don’t be alarmed if you’re having difficulty remembering events from when you were under the goa’uld’s control, or if you are remembering things you don’t think happened to you. It’s a common side-effect of being a former host.”

“No. That’s not...” He carefully set his hands down in his lap and looked up at her. “The last thing I remember. I was killing... someone. Strangling him.”

Oh, shit. “Mr. Ford, whatever the goa’uld did, it was not your fault—”

“It was me in every way that mattered, in that moment. Just tell me, did I kill him?”

She exchanged a look with Cathy. “Do you know his name, or can you describe him?”

“Yeah. Eliot Spencer. It was here. Um, not this room. In this base, by the Stargate.”

Well, he clearly hadn’t been totally shut down like some hosts were. She suspected it would be more of a curse than a blessing.

Fully taken up as she’d been with an urgent de-snaking operation, she had yet to catch up on all the other lesser injury reports—including whatever clusterfuck had happened on P2N-983—but she did know that they’d all been minor by comparison, with no fatalities. “The goa’uld didn’t kill anybody in this base.”

“I think Miranda saw him,” said Cathy from beside her, clarifying, “Dr. Hersh. White male, hair just past shoulder-length, tough-looking guy? We didn’t keep him overnight.”

Ford closed his eyes again, his expression struggling with something that wasn’t quite relief. “That’s... good to know.”

“Would you like some more water?” Carolyn offered. This time she let him hold the cup, eyeing his grip and judging his motor control. It gave her an excuse to look away from his face for a moment, and let him pretend he had some privacy in which to compose himself.

* * *

Landry would have liked to interrogate Ford sooner, but Carolyn had put her foot down. The full neuropsychological assessment battery prescribed post-de-snaking took several hours, and then she had insisted Ford be allowed to get some natural sleep, if at all possible. “His brain tissue has just been compressed, shoved around, decompressed, and moved around some more,” she’d said, looking very unhappy. “For god’s sake, I’ve told you before how this works. He needs some calm and quiet and to be allowed to heal, not subjected to an interrogation by somebody who wants to give him a stroke!”

“I don’t want to give him a stroke,” Landry protested, but... well, he’d known going in that he was probably going to lose that argument.

So it was that he didn’t get to talk to Nathan Ford—arguably the catalyst of this whole damn mess—until the second day after the break-in.

Ford was, apparently, a (formerly) convicted felon, and an internationally renowned thief—or, possibly, he was an innocent man who’d had his life ripped away from him more years ago than his team wanted to admit. Either way, he hadn’t walked himself into the base; they had no cause to put him in handcuffs. They’d compromised on security by giving him a private recovery room with an armed guard. After Landry finally got Carolyn to stop reading him the riot act for a second time and sign off, he found Ford sitting at the little table rather than still in bed. He’d gotten a chess set from somewhere, a dinky travel-sized plastic board, and seemed to be playing against himself.

“Mr. Ford.”

“General.” Ford’s eyes flickered between Landry and the chess set. “Do you play?”

“Indifferently, only,” said Landry, pulling up a folding chair opposite. Ford was resetting the pieces with quick, practised movements; by the time Landry finished settling in, the board was ready to go. He’d set it out with the black set facing himself, but after a moment reached out and rotated the board a hundred and eighty degrees. Then he moved a pawn.

“You know why I’m here,” said Landry.

“Ya-huh. But I’ve just spent the last couple weeks not driving, so, indulge me.”

Weeks, then. Interesting that he would admit it. If he’d gainsaid it, they would have had no way to prove it otherwise. Ford’s file pegged him as an honest citizen until four years ago. He could have had that back.

‘ _My best friend’s son died.’_ Well, maybe not.

Landry shrugged and moved a pawn. Ford nodded, and moved again. “What do you want to know?” There was no trace of Dujardin’s accent in Ford’s voice. There wasn’t much of the Frenchman’s mannerisms in him, either.

“Let’s start at the beginning. How did you wind up in the same vicinity as Bes?”

There was no answer, at first, until Landry moved another piece.

“Do you know what multilevel marketing is, General?”

“A pyramid scheme that’s somehow legal. As I understand it, they operate much like a cult to recruit and retain their victims.”

They traded moves rapid-fire as Ford began to talk. “If you know that then you already know why Bes was sitting on top of one. The other reason being it’s a thirty-six billion dollar industry and he’s got a lot of expensive tastes. He got into it back in the eighties, after he got tired of hanging out in Iraq, burned his setup there and took himself over to America. Teliway had been going for decades, by then—Bes ditched his old meatsuit, made himself at home in the shoes of Teliway’s then-CEO, and bam, multimillion dollar empire, with tens of thousands of victims all devoted to him, to the dream he could sell them...”

Former goa’uld hosts often experienced memory transfers, which would later manifest as flashes of memory or strange dreams, but Landry had never heard of someone coming out of it with this level of coherent detail. Bes was dead—the de-snaking process was invariably lethal for the snake—but if Ford had enough details to help them track down whatever caches of technology he’d no doubt hidden away, that could be extremely valuable. Even the confirmation that Bes had been on Earth since at least the eighties was valuable.

“You know my name. So you know what I do. We had a client—a young woman whose mother had gotten involved in Teliway a couple years back, wiped out her retirement fund, was about to lose her house. I told the daughter we’d get her mom out, get her money back. Your move, General.”

Landry moved.

Ford took his rook. “Check.”

Landry hadn’t been paying much attention to strategy; a small line black pieces had already accumulated to one side of the board. It was more important to keep Ford talking. People who’d been under goa’uld control could come out a bit... strange. He moved again.

Ford took one of his knights. “Checkmate.” He started resetting the board.

“So you started investigating Teliway,” Landry prompted.

“I’d had my eye on ‘Andrew Smith’ for a while. He was a guy who liked to step on people. Now, the problem with a cult is that you can’t convince a victim to get out—they have to convince themselves. Your move.” He waited for Landry to push a pawn forward and moved out a knight. “And the problem with MLMs is that they’re legal—they sell a physical product, so they’re not technically a pyramid scheme. To bring down Teliway we had to show they were doing something that _was_ illegal—something blatantly, massively illegal. We fished around some, caught word that a couple different states would be thrilled to put together RICO charges... so we started looking into Smith’s other companies. The subsidiaries. The ‘charities’. Did you know about the kids, General?”

The casual tone was belied by the look in Ford’s eyes. This was a man riding the sharp edge of rage, one short impulse away from flipping the board—or more likely, the table.

Landry met his gaze squarely. “I learned about them in the later stages of our investigation, yes.” He took his next move.

Ford countered without looking down. “Later stages? When would that be, exactly?”

Landry captured his bishop. “Too late, to protect them as well as we should have.”

Ford looked away. Looked back at the board. Made another move. “Bes was worshipped as a god. He craved it. He felt children provided the purest form of worship... that if he could take and mould the mind of a child, they would focus on him with a singular devotion unattainable from an adult. Back on the subcontinent he used to make a point of recruiting young women, new mothers... he’d raise up a generation of perfectly brainwashed slaves. But, of course, kids turn into adults, eventually. So he’d be forever on his guard, for those signs of disobedience, of defiance. He’d push it as long as he could, and then he’d murder them all. It made sure that they’d be with him forever in spirit, you see. Forever his. Check.”

Landry pushed his rook sideways, and promptly lost it to Ford’s knight.

“That last time in Iraq, it hadn’t gone well for him. A whole bunch of them got away, the authorities tried to come down on his head... he could have killed everyone they sent after him, but that wasn’t the point. It was the defiance that really got to him. Made him rage. So after he moved over to America and set himself up in his new life, made certain he had the required number of attendants and sycophants, he started looking into something new. He started looking for disobedient children. He wanted to run some experiments. Really delve into the mind of a child. Figure out how best to break them, make them pure.”

Ford took Landry’s knight. Landry didn’t comment on the way Ford’s hand was shaking, ever-so-slightly.

“He set up a camp aimed at delinquent children. Billed it as an ‘intervention’ before something happened that might send them to juvie. And he had all those desperate, dreaming parents hooked into Teliway, who wanted their children to be disciplined and successful, and stay out of the way... he didn’t lack supply. Teliway, Smith, they had plenty of experience moving money around, exploiting all the legal loopholes. He got his private camp, he got total sign-off from the parents, he got a complete lack of oversight. He got to do whatever he wanted.”

Landry took a pawn. Ford nabbed his queen.

“Check. Five states itching to hammer this guy with corruption charges and here he was in Utah, sticking kids in cages. Well, we’re not really equipped to handle that many traumatized kids, and hey, it was in the US. So we took it to the Utah state police. They told us it was all above-board. We took it to the FBI. They told us there was nothing they could do. Orders had come down to keep watch and make no move, pending higher authorization. Was that you?”

“We were awaiting reinforcement.” Specifically, the Odyssey, which had gotten delayed returning from P9H-143. It had been Landry’s call; he’d wanted a ship of their own in orbit, just in case Bes had a way off-world that they hadn’t spotted. “At that point we didn’t know about the children’s situation.”

“Huh.”

“Don’t think I don’t regret that delay, Mr. Ford.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s a real comfort to those kids.” Ford was demolishing Landry’s defence with a totality that felt faintly mocking—they should have reached checkmate again by now. “Well, you had us boxed in, so we changed plans on the fly. Took what we were originally planning to take down Teliway and moved it to Utah. Insisted on high security. Moved it out to the compound. And made a racket. Got the kids out, got evidence—even the FBI can’t ignore it when they see a man pointing an M16 at an eight-year-old American child.”

Ford picked up one of his knights and studied it. It was the first time he hadn’t moved a piece with total certainty.

“I was the distraction. You always need a distraction, for that kind of con—you have to keep them pinned down, so they don’t react until it’s too late. And I do like being the last guy out. It lets me make sure that they’re well and truly screwed. That they don’t have one last trick up their sleeve.

“Turned out he did. Caught up to me in the hall. I thought he was having a stroke. I suppose the real Andrew Smithe actually did.” Ford set the knight down. “Check.”

Landry sacrificed a bishop. “How’d it go from there to breaking in to the SGC?”

“I’d taken away his cult, his money, his kids... but I’d just handed him a team of the best infiltration specialists in the world. He’d been stuck on Earth for three thousand years. He wanted off. Of course the SGC was the first thing he thought of. Check.”

“How did Bes know about the SGC?” Landry took one of Ford’s pawns and promptly lost his other knight.

“Oh, that was simple. Ba’al told him. About two years ago, they hooked up, put together a little alliance. Well, I say alliance, it was really Ba’al making Bes run all his errands, while he strung Bes along with an offer to get him on a ship off Earth. Personally I don’t think Ba’al had any intent on following through, Bes was too useful to him, but... that’s the danger of any lopsided relationship.” Ford slid his rook forward. “Checkmate.”

Showy bastard. Landry raised his eyebrows, looking at him over the ruin of the board. “You’re very good at this game.”

A muscle jumped in Ford’s jaw. “If I was any good at it I’d be pretending to let you win. Where is my team, General Landry?”

“In secure holding. They broke into a highly restricted facility and jeopardized the safety of everyone of everyone in it, and unlike yourself, they did it entirely of their own volition.”

“No. Not of their own volition. They did it for me. You want to know all the tech Bes has got stashed around the world, all those errands Ba’al got him to run? I’ll tell you all about it. _After_ my team is free and clear. No pending charges, no retaliation.”

And there it was. After the song-and-dance the rest of Ford’s crew had given him, he couldn’t say he hadn’t expected it. “Given the nature of the information you claim to possess, Mr. Ford, keeping it secret is grounds for a federal charge of treason. Are you really willing to risk that?”

The answer to that was written between the lines of the brief description of Ford’s trip to prison. But Landry wanted to see what Ford would say.

Ford sat back, a paper-thin veneer of devil-may-care drawn across himself in an instant. “Oh, come on, General, what do you even want them for? Just to stick them in a box? That doesn’t gain you anything. You can recruit Hardison, but then you’ll have a more massive security risk than the one we just exposed. Sophie won’t want to go fight aliens, and Parker—you don’t actually _have_ Parker, so...”

And how had he figured _that_ out? Ford’s team was exposing all _kinds_ of security weaknesses. But there was one member of his crew that he hadn’t mentioned. “Many people would argue that Eliot Spencer deserves a fate considerably less merciful than a box. I’d happen to agree with them.”

Booting Spencer back out into the world had been one of Hammond’s true mistakes, in Landry’s opinion. There wasn’t any point to Monday-morning quarterbacking another man’s decision, usually, but on this occasion, when he was faced with making the exact same mistake...

“A box, General? Like, say, a four-by-eight foot cell, with no heating or air conditioning, getting down to freezing at night or a hundred degrees in the day? Six weeks ago Eliot Spencer pulled twenty-six kids out of boxes like that. Kids that you. Left. There.”

That stung.

They hadn’t known about the kids’ situation until the FBI—until Ford—had changed the play on them. Even so, they’d been a day or two at most from going in themselves. But not knowing was a flimsy excuse, and it stung that it was all he had. Half those kids had been under ten. Landry had spent weeks regretting every delay in that op, but his regrets had nothing on what those kids had been through.

All the mockery, calculated or otherwise, had vanished from Ford’s expression. “People do change, General. You want Eliot to pay for the man he was—I’d say he already is. Every time we help someone, every time we make a difference—it might not be justice, but it’s a lot closer than anyone gets if he’s sitting on his ass doing nothing.”

Yeah, Landry could see exactly what Ford thought about sitting on his ass, doing nothing.

He considered it. He’d catch hell for it. He’d also catch hell if he tried keeping Ford here. At the end of the day it was, if not the deal he’d had in mind, much along the same lines as what he’d reluctantly authorized Carter to offer Hardison. Information about Ba’al was too damn valuable to throw away because of wounded pride. Ford might be willing to do that, commit treason and stew in prison rather than open his mouth. Landry had a duty to his country and his homeworld.

“You will all each explain _everything_ you did in infiltrating and compromising this facility,” he said firmly.

“Agreed.”

“You will all sign NDAs. I realize that probably won’t mean much to you or them, but you break those, I _will_ see you prosecuted for it.”

Ford nodded.

Landry reached out and tipped over his king. “You have yourself a deal, Mr. Ford.”


	7. Chapter 7

“No regrets?” asked Sam, as she finished signing witness. She gathered the pages of the NDA together, tapped them once against the desk to even the edges of the stack, and stuck them in the file folder.

“Hell yeah. I’m not crazy, of course I wish...” Hardison trailed off, looking wistful. And very young. He was only twenty-five years old, Sam remembered. But then, with all the benefit of years more experience, Sam couldn’t say that she didn’t still feel a thrill every time she stepped through the Stargate. It had that effect on you. “I just... I wish it didn’t gotta be like this.”

Landry had killed Hardison’s deal as soon as Ford had offered a different one. Sam had protested—the kid was brilliant, with a natural knack for goa’uld programming unlike anyone else she’d ever seen—but Landry had held firm: if Hardison was loyal to his crew of criminals, then he would forever pose a security risk. And with his talents, any security risk was a _massive_ security risk.

Sam couldn’t argue the latter. She wasn’t sure about the former.

“I wanted to,” Hardison said, and it sounded like a confession. “If it just meant leaving the team... I’d do it, I’d try it. But I can’t do it when it means leaving the team in a hole, you know? That’s not—that I can’t do.”

Sam thought about nine years of teamwork, crazy missions and crazier rescues, of knowing other people so closely you would step in front of a bullet for them, would count on them to step in front of a bullet for you. Nine years of never leaving anyone behind.

“I understand,” she said. “For what it’s worth... I’d think less of you if you had.”

He looked at her, startled.

She smiled and stood. “See you in a few years, maybe, Mr. Hardison.”

* * *

Teal’c ran across Mitchell standing in the hallway outside of Smithe-Patel’s cell, flipping through the pages of the NDA with a thoughtful look on his face.

“Is there a problem, Colonel Mitchell?”

“If none of these are her real name, is this still legally binding?”

* * *

Teal’c watched Spencer walk down the hall toward the elevator, escorted by a pair of Marines. Spencer was still in handcuffs; on Landry’s order, he’d remain that way until he was off NORAD property. Teal’c held no illusions that it would have prevented him from taking out his two guards, had it come to that. No, Spencer was held in check by the sheer number of armed military in this facility, and the very, very limited options he had for getting out. The security breach in the shaft had been sealed, and no amount of combat prowess would enable Spencer to punch through a blast door.

But, perhaps, he was also held in check by concern for his teammates. Teal’c could not be sure. His mannerisms seemed very much the same as those of the coldly collected monster Teal’c had met eight years ago.

Spencer nodded to him as he passed. There was neither diffidence nor disrespect in the action.

Teal’c watched him go, and hoped that General Landry was not making a grave mistake.

* * *

Mitchell stepped into Ford’s room, and was disconcerted to find Vala there before him, sitting across the table from him. Between them, the chessboard that Ford was so fond of lay open, a game in progress, although Mitchell couldn’t tell who was winning at first glance. He took a second, and frowned. He wasn’t sure that was actually chess.

“Well, well,” said Vala, sitting up and throwing Mitchell a wink. “Looks like your ride to a life of freedom is here.”

Ford raised his eyebrows slightly, looking between the two of them, and nodded. “Thank you, Ms. Mal Doran.”

“Please. I told you, it’s Vala.”

She rose smoothly, sashaying her way to the door. Mitchell paused her with a hand on her shoulder. “What,” he muttered, “was that about?”

“We’ve got similar interests, that’s all,” Vala said, voice low and amused. “Do you know, there are a number of _fascinating_ aspects to your planet that Daniel’s never told me about? Or you, for that matter.”

Mitchell closed his eyes with a brief prayer for strength, and Vala slipped away. When he opened them again, Ford was studying him.

“Time to go,” said Mitchell, not bothering to conceal his weariness.

If Interpol’s file was right about Ford, it’d be a useless attempt, anyway.

* * *

Mitchell went in the car himself. They were dropping Ford at the Colorado Springs Airport—and he could have left it to the young airmen assigned to the vehicle, should have, maybe, but he found he wanted to see this was done. And, possibly, he was a little bit nervous about leaving those young airmen alone with Ford, or Ford’s people.

Teal’c came along, a comforting presence, at least until he started playing chess with Ford, which Ford somehow made seem a vaguely sinister activity. It turned out Ford’s dinky little chess set, along with being able to fold up, also had magnetic pieces: it’d been designed for travel, and it held up perfectly fine as the car wound its way down the mountain. Mitchell wondered who had given it to him, or if he’d just stolen it, though how he’d have managed to steal it under the noses of everybody who’d been watching him for the last couple days, Mitchell had no idea.

But then, he’d sat through all the interviews as each of the four thieves had explained exactly how they’d gotten into the base, and parts of that seemed pretty far-fetched, too.

And they _still_ hadn’t found Parker, though Mitchell was favouring Walter’s theory that she’d escaped up the primary shaft.

Ford’s debriefing had taken an extra two days, because he’d insisted on confirmation that his team was free and clear before he’d been willing to go into any details about Ba’al or Bes. The deal Landry had cut had been solid: Ford had given them half a dozen safe-houses, and four times that many companies that Ba’al had been involved with in some way or another, complete with bank account numbers and passwords. They were going to be following up on those leads for months—but if they could finally root out Ba’al machinations on Earth, this whole embarrassing episode would be well worth the trouble.

When they pulled up at the airport curb, Spencer, Hardison, and Smithe-Patel—or whatever her real name was—were all waiting for them. Ford’s gaze became fixed out the window.

“Perhaps we can finish our game another time,” Teal’c said graciously, opening the door on his side.

“Yeah,” Ford said, distracted. “Yeah.” He snapped the board shut with one hand and stuck it in his coat pocket.

“Don’t say that,” Mitchell muttered to Teal’c, as he got out of the car himself. “Please don’t.”

Teal’c gave him an unreadable look as Ford stepped forward, slowly, toward the rest of his team. Forget chess, Mitchell thought—the man had a hell of a poker face. His teammates’ expressions were universally relief. The three of them stepped forward as one, and then Smithe-Patel-Whoever closed the distance between them and pulled him into a hug. He clung back to her like she was a rock, and the other three piled on, making it a group affair.

Wait.

Other three?

Mitchell blinked at the blond woman clinging to the rest of them. “Where did she come from?”

“I believe she may have been on the underside of our car.”

He turned to stare at Teal’c. “What?”

“It is merely a hypothesis,” said Teal’c, unperturbed, as the five thieves—or whatever they were—detangled themselves, and began to walk into the airport. Only Spencer looked back, and his eyes never met Mitchell’s. He wasn’t really looking back, Mitchell realized after a moment. Just around. Scanning for threats, while the rest of his team was distracted and caught up in giddy relief.

Mitchell rubbed his face. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

#### Boston, Nate’s Apartment  
Later

“You’re sure they don’t have any bugs.”

“Yeah, man, I’m sure,” said Hardison. “I sweep this place daily.”

Nate stared at him, jaw working, and Hardison held up a hand to forestall him. “I swept it twenty minutes ago, Nate.”

Nate turned away and picked up his coffee cup, and yeah, that was a thing, too. Hardison would have expected the first thing Nate would want to do would be to bury himself in a bottle. Hell, if Hardison had had a _giant alien snake_ living in his brain, the first thing _he’d_ have wanted to do would be to get blackout drunk, once he’d finished curling up and screaming like a little girl. But Nate hadn’t drunk anything except coffee—at the airport, on the plane, again at the airport, at the apartment—and it was freaking Hardison out.

When Nate had had a _giant alien_ _snake_ curled up in his brain ( _ahhhh,_ went Hardison’s, considering it) he’d acted more like Nate. He’d been drinking and he’d been a bastard in all the usual Nate-ways, and Hardison hadn’t noticed. None of them had noticed. Hell, even Sophie hadn’t noticed, and she was supposed to be sleeping with the guy, and, y’know, the best of all of them at this.

Now that the brainsnake ( _ahhhh)_ was _gone_ , Nate was acting weird.

“I owe you all an apology,” said Nate. Parker sprayed out her mouthful of popcorn. Hardison knocked over his bottle and nearly got orange soda all over his keyboard. He yelped, lifting his laptop out of the line of fire.

“Nate, it wasn’t your fault,” Sophie said, standing and abandoning her own snacks (Hardison’s snacks. She’d been stealing Hardison’s snacks, which was Red Flag Numero Uno that she was just as off-balance from this as Nate. But then, she _had_ been sleeping with the giant alien brainsnake _(ahhhh_ _hh_ _h)_ so Hardison figured she could have all the snacks she wanted.)

“No,” said Eliot. “No, that gloating thing you do? That’s risky, and that’s stupid, and that’s not happening again.”

Sophie glowered at him. “Eliot, that’s not fair—”

“And we’re all wearing cameras from now on,” said Eliot. “ _All_ of us. There could be more goa’uld on Earth—”

“Thank you, I was trying _not_ to think about that,” Hardison said, a little shrilly.

“—and burying your head in the sand will help? Cameras,” Eliot repeated. “And we’re getting MRIs on the regular from now on.”

“That does make sense,” said Sophie.

“Yes. Yes it does,” said Nate, and they all exchanged an _oh, shit, what’s up with Nate_ glance again, because that was definitely an _I have a plan_ voice.

“At the end of the day all those reasons I gave you for breaking in to the SGC—”

“Reasons _it_ gave us,” said Sophie, firmly. And then, more uncertain: “It was it, wasn’t it?”

“My plan, it... driving,” said Nate, and for a moment his face went blank in that particularly scary way, because that was Nate angry enough to dismantle someone down to constituent parts and leave the bloody pieces screaming in a pile behind him. “I—that’s the apology bit. It was my plan. But, you know, it wasn’t a bad plan.”

Sophie was looking at Nate too intently; she missed out on the next round of _J_ _esus, Nate_ looks. It was Eliot who said, quietly, “Seriously, man?”

“We got caught,” said Parker, voice small.

“You got caught because you were betrayed,” said Nate, going over to his keurig and setting his mug in it. By Hardison’s count, that would make his fourth just since they’d got back. Dude was gonna give himself a stroke. “But you went in there—you went in there for good reasons. To save lives. Millions of lives. Lives that the SGC would let... slip away, because they’re more concerned with maintaining the illusion.”

“Nate,” said Sophie. “We _can’t_ go back.”

“They know our faces,” said Eliot. “We told them how we beat them, it won’t work again. They won’t let us go a second time.”

“They don’t even _have_ a sarcophagus,” said Hardison. “I mean—okay, Colonel Mitchell could’ve been lying when he told me that, but the dude seemed pretty frustrated at the time.”

“They don’t,” said Nate. “They’ve _had_ at least two, at different points in time, but they managed to blow up or otherwise lose both.”

They all stared at him.

“Week-long debriefing, come on, you pick stuff up,” he said impatiently.

Eliot pointed at him. “You’re going for an MRI tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” said Parker.

“Whatever,” said Nate. “Listen to me. They don’t have a sarcophagus. But we do.”

The staring this time was more intense.

“No,” said Sophie.

“You didn’t really think I’d tell them about _all_ of Bes’ caches, did you?” Nate circled the counter, smirking over the rim of his coffee cup.

“No,” Sophie repeated.

Hardison sputtered, “There could be alien brain-worms in there!”

“So we invest in chainmail. Look, I gave it to you as a two-stage plan: we find the sarcophagus, then we figure out a way to make sure it’s used for the public good. Stage one was a ruse but we _did_ get a sarcophagus. Now—now, we figure out how to make it so the SGC can’t stop it from being researched.”

“They’ll be watching for us now,” said Sophie. “They’re going to be extra-aware of anyone who seems to be—to be working on alien technology—”

“So we vet and we plan very, very carefully. Maybe it takes a while. Maybe it takes years. We take as long as we need, this time.”

“ _That’s_ a change.”

Nate stared at her. Hardison could feel Eliot shifting beside him, tensing. “ _That_ ,” said Nate, “was not me.”

Oh.

“I’m not out here to get us caught, guys. I know, this is—it’ll take time. But... eight years ago, the SGC—they had a sarcophagus. They had a machine that could produce miracles, and they let it get blown up. And then they got another, and—they lost that one, too. They’ve had their chances, and they don’t... it’s _not_ a priority to them. It’s never been a priority to them. I wasn’t lying about that. They’re wrapped up in weapons, in defence, and—and maybe they do a good job at that, but that’s their entire focus. They’ve had a decade of the active program, and they’re still no closer to going public, to sharing any of this technology, than they were ten years ago. They’re too focused on keeping it secret, keeping the Earth... safe.”

He looked down at his coffee, staring into his mug as if it might hold answers. “But it’s not safe. That’s just an illusion to pacify the masses, one big lie. And in the meantime... people are dying. Adults. Kids. And they don’t see it.”

Slowly, Sophie asked, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

Nate’s smile was dark and razor-sharp. “Let’s go steal... a global conspiracy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it's done! Hope you enjoyed :D

**Author's Note:**

> I've never tried copying/pasting with headers into AO3 before. It looks okay on my display but if there's problems please let me know. (Concrit is welcome is general. Especially typo-correction. I went back and re-added a bunch of spaces between words that AO3 stripped out, but I swear it seems to remove more every time I hit edit.)


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